From the Finder you drag files and folders (multiple file formats are no problem) onto the BarbaBatch input window. Then you select one or more predefined conversion settings, or you create new settings for a conversion. You select the output destination folder and you hit Go. For each selected conversion a folder will be created and the complete input hierarchy (sub folders and all) will be recreated in the required file format.

For each file type you can set bit rate (kbits/sec) or number of bits per word up to 64 bits. BarbaBatch offers the highest possible quality in samplerate conversion. Samplerates can range from 1000 Hz to 192 kHz. Channel processing is flexible. You can mix stereo to mono or vise versa, copy just single channels left or right, create interleaved stereo from split stereo files and vise versa.

There is a normalizer that normalizes to a user set ceiling, but also a look-ahead gating algorithm with very intuitive controls, and a look-ahead peak limiter that makes your audio blast even through the smallest of speakers. The gate and peak limiters are built to straighten out speech, but are often used on musical material as well. Regions from Wave files, DDP IMAGE.DAT files, and Sonddesigner II files can be extracted to separate files You can set up the conversion so that it will convert for instance 20 seconds of audio from every input file, starting at second number 15, and creating a 1 second fade in and a 500 msec fade out. You can fade in and fade out all file types that can be input to BarbaBatch.

If you set it up to do so, BarbaBatch will try to preserve Regions, loops markers and Time Stamps and sampler information from input to output. It will recalculate Marker loop and region positions when regions are extracted or when samplerate is converted.

New in v4.0.59

• Sound Designer bugfix

New in v4.0.55

• Wave 32-bit float files were interpreted wrong on PowerPC.
• Broadcast Wave MPEG files had one wrong chunk header.
• MP3 files could fail to embed ID3 tags.