24-bit audio format for Logic Pro 10 to import

nkamae wrote:

I'm going to send 24-bit audio source files for someone to mix them with Logic Pro 10.

[…]

Usually I'm converting audio files with FFmpeg. Is there a format that can handle both FFmpeg and Logic Pro?

If you were sending the files to me to mix them, I would urge you: "Please do not touch them, send them all as is. I will convert them to whatever format I need myself."

In other words, if the guy who's doing the mix knows what they are doing, they should actualy tell you the same thing. :)

But for what it's worth, Apple's afconvert command line tool does an excellent job in converting from and to any relevant format. The only drawback is that it won't retain any metadata. Of course you need to know what you're doing because apart from the man pages and a few 3rd party websites, afconvert is quite poorly documented by Apple.

I, for one, usually record as 24-bit 44.1 kHz, then I convert to ALAC within a CAF container.

A simple shell script as an Automator Finder Service workflow:

for f in "$@"; do
afconvert -v -f 'caff' -d alac -t "$f"
done

The benefits:

• smaller file size with lossless compression than using uncompressed AIFF/WAVE/CAF
• direct readability of the CAF container by Logic without having to convert or even create sidecar waveform overviews

Another shell script I'm using inside an Automator service that converts and resamples any readable input format to highest quality 24-bit/44.1 kHz AIFF:

for f in "$@"; do
	afconvert -v -f 'AIFF' -d BEI24@44100 --src-complexity bats -r 127 "$f"
done

What is the format you are being given? Officially Logic supports ...AIFF, WAV (BWF), CAF, SDII, Apple Lossless, eligible MP3, and AAC (noneligible files will be converted to PCM)". If you want to keep as much quality as possible, do NOT transcode the file at all. And if you are forced to, transcode to AIFF or WAV (both are equal).

So far Logic Pro doesn't support importing 32-bit floating point files and converts them to 24bit.

If you deliver any files to a mixing or mastering engineer (how is using a DAW that support 32bit float import), you definitely should deliver in 32bit float (de-facto mastering-delivery standard now), especially if you have applied any processing already in your Project.

Media and file formats in Logic Pro