Viewing or Editing File Properties

Alt+Enter

File Menu

From the File menu, choose Properties (or double-click any of the boxes in the status bar) to view or edit information about the active sound file.

This information is saved with the file and can be displayed by media players when you save your project in a different file format.

Which tab do you want to learn more about?

General

The General tab contains technical information about the current sound file, including size, location, file type, and file attributes. This information is for display only.

Microsoft .wav files are composed of sections called RIFF chunks. These chunks contain the sound data plus other embedded information. If there are any nonstandard chunks found in the current file, the Junk chunks, Padding chunks, and Additional chunks fields will be marked Yes. These chunks might be used by other sound utilities or contain extraneous information that can cause glitching in some programs.

Summary

The Summary tab contains extra information that can be embedded in the sound file. This tab is available only for .wav, .avi, and .mp3 files.

Item

Description

Title

Enter the title of the project.

Subject

Enter name of the artist who performed in the project.

Engineer

Enter the name of the person who engineered the project.

Copyright

Enter copyright information about the project.

Comments

Enter any comments you want to associate with the project.

Extended

Click to display the Extended Summary dialog.

Load

Click to set the current file’s summary information fields to the default settings. The default values can be set in the Extended Summary dialog.

Picture

Click to display the Open Picture dialog, where you can select an icon, bitmap or cursor to be attached to the current file.

Format

Use the Format tab to change the data format of the current data window. For more information about data formats, click here.

Item

Description

Sample rate

Choose a sample rate from the drop-down list or enter a value in the edit box.

This setting will not resample the sound file. If the playback rate is different from the originally recorded rate, the pitch will vary unless resampling is done.

Bit depth

Choose a bit depth from the drop-down list to specify the format used to store each sample value.

If a file is opened in Direct mode, you cannot increase the file's bit depth using these radio buttons. Use the Save As command to increase the bit depth.

Channels

Click the Mono or Stereo radio button to select the number of tracks stored in the file.

Use the Channel Converter to perform advanced channel mixing.

Source

Displays the sample rate, bit-depth, and number of channels in the source file.

Temporary

Displays the sample rate, bit-depth, and number of channels in the temporary file.

Process/DSP

Displays the sample rate, bit-depth, and number of channels used when processing your file.

Playback

Displays the sample rate, bit-depth, and number of channels that will be used for playback.

Cursor position

Displays the cursor position in the sound file using the current units.

Sample value

Displays the sample value at the current cursor position in the sound file:

  • In 32-bit audio, these values range from -2147483648 to 2147483647.

  • In 24-bit audio, they range from -8388608 to 8388607.
  • In 16-bit audio, they range from -32768 to 32767.
  • In 8-bit audio, they range from -128 to 127.

Peak data ratio

Displays the ratio at which the peak data is stored. This means that when zoomed out beyond 1:512, the peak file, instead of the entire file is scanned when drawing the waveform.

Sound data size

Displays the amount of storage space being used by the sound data.

Video source format

Displays the frame size (height, width, bits per pixel) and compression algorithm of the original AVI file.

Video decompression format

Displays the intermediate frame size (height, width, bits per pixel) and compression algorithm used by Sound Forge before displaying the video frames. The video decompression mode can be changed from the Perform tab in the Preferences dialog.

Undo buffers

Displays the number of undo buffers that exist for the sound file and the amount of hard-drive space they consume.

Redo buffers

Displays the number of redo buffers that exist for the sound file and the amount of hard-drive space they consume.

Video

The Video tab contains information specific to Microsoft AVI files.

An AVI file can contain multiple video and/or audio streams (or tracks). For example, you can include multiple audio tracks in different languages to go along with a video. When playing back, Microsoft’s Media player detects the operating system's language and plays the corresponding video stream.

Item

Description

Stream

Displays information about the video and/or audio streams present in the AVI file, such as name, compression format, frame rate, and language.

The black diamond to the left of the streams indicate the active streams. You can view and edit additional information (stream name, language, and priority of the active audio stream) by clicking on the sign to expand the list. Right-clicking on a field in the right-hand column allows you to edit it.

Streams that are checked will be preserved when the file is saved. Streams that are not checked will be deleted when the file is saved.

Attach/Detatch

If your sound file does not currently contain any video, you can attach a video from an AVI file by clicking the Attach button. If your file already has a video stream, click the Detach button to remove the stream.

Display

The Display tab allows you to change which controls are displayed when the sound file is open in a data window. Selecting a check box will display that item in the current sound file’s data window. An unchecked item will not be displayed.

To set the current settings as the default display for all sound files, simply select the Save as the default for all new windows check box.