Hello, this is my first post here … I've been learning Houdini for around 6 weeks, and trying to convert from a few years of 3ds Max. I also might be one of the few who are interested in Houdini for it's audio features (I am a sound engineer as well).

Anyway, I'm trying to export an audio file out of Houdini using the “Save Data Channels” feature by right clicking on a chop node. While this seems to work (saving to .wav format). It exports in an 8 bit file, even if it reads in a 16 bit (cd quality) file. 8bit is a very old sound format, and 16 bit is standard for dynamic range (basically, how many low-high values of volume are there .. with 16 bit there are 65536, with 8 only 256.

I was wondering if anyone knew how to export a 16 bit file from Houdini. Hopefully all these fancy audio recording features and there is a way to get it out into decent quality. I also noticed more posts saying how exporting produced noise etc .. this is probably due to the 8 bit factor.

I'm also noticing in the documentation under “chop internals” that all chops are made of 32 bit floating point numbers, which is considered “high res” audio when it is in .wav format. Hmmm, if there was a command or feature to get it to export that way.

Any suggestions?

Ok, got it to work … the “bchan” export format seems to be a full res audio file. However, it must be “interpreted” by an audio program that can parse raw data.

Adobe Audition has this feature, when importing, specify the sample rate (which in this case is 44100), the resolution “32 bits float”, and data formatted as 32-bit IEEE Float 0.24 whatever that means, 0 input offset.

This will allow high-res audio to be exported from Houdini, I'd still be curious if there is a way to get full-res .wav files out though.