[Help] 7 mono WAV files to 6.1

[allldu]

No, there's no free way.  You have to use the encoding suite.

And I suspect same goes for Dolby TrueHD?

[Chewtobacca]

And I suspect same goes for Dolby TrueHD?

I'm afraid so.

EDIT: The issue isn't simply that PCM is raw and therefore cannot have a ".1" channel. (If that were so, then all six-track PCM would be treated as 6.0, and all eight-track PCM would be treated as 8.0, which is not the case.) Rather, the issue is also about the assumption made about PCM streams by hardware, etc. Six-track and eight-track streams are correctly assumed to be 5.1 and 7.1 respectively because those are the default/"only" channel configurations, but seven-track audio has two valid channel configurations (6.1 and 7.0), which is what causes the confusion, hence the modification made to eac3to's default behavior when converting 6.1 to PCM for BD.

[schorman]

Here's some batch files I made for converting 6 mono waves to 5.1 and 8 mono waves to 7.1 using ffmpeg.  Save these as a text file with the .bat file extension in the same folder as your ffmpeg.exe. 

I just drag the 6 or 8 files and drop on the batch file, and it does all the work.  Just make sure to name the files in the correct order.  I typically add _1, _2, _3, etc. to the file names in the correct order.

For example:

audio_1.wav (Left Channel)
audio_2.wav (Right Channel)
audio_3.wav (Center Channel)
audio_4.wav (LFE Channel)
audio_5.wav (Surr. / Side Left Channel)
audio_6.wav (Surr. / Side Right Chanel)
*audio_7.wav (Back Left Channel)
*audio_8.wav (Back Right Channel)

Note that you can use the script to batch processes as many files as you want, for instance dropping 18 wav files will create 3 5.1 files. Also note that ffmpeg will automatically set the default channel mask for 5.1 / 7.1.

These batch files can easilty be altered to suit a different channel format, as well.

For 24bit pcm, 6mono --> 5.1 wav. (if you are working with 16 bit audio, you can leave out the "-c:a pcm_s24le" text below.

Code:

@ECHO OFF
TITLE "6 Mono Wavs to 5.1 Wav (24bit)"
if [%1]==[] goto :eof
set Destination=%~d1\%~p1
cd /d %Destination%
md 5.1
cd /d "%~dp0"
:loop
ffmpeg -i "%~1" -i "%~2" -i "%~3" -i "%~4" -i "%~5" -i "%~6" -filter_complex "[0:a][1:a][2:a][3:a][4:a][5:a]amerge=inputs=6[aout]" -map "[aout]" -c:a pcm_s24le "%Destination%\5.1\%~n1"_5.1Merge.wav
shift
shift
shift
shift
shift
shift
if not [%1]==[] goto loop

For 24bit pcm, 8mono --> 7.1 wav. (if you are working with 16 bit audio, you can leave out the "-c:a pcm_s24le" text below.

Code:

@ECHO OFF
TITLE "8 Mono Wavs to 7.1 Wav (24bit)"
if [%1]==[] goto :eof
set Destination=%~d1\%~p1
cd /d %Destination%
md 7.1
cd /d "%~dp0"
:loop
ffmpeg -i "%~1" -i "%~2" -i "%~3" -i "%~4" -i "%~5" -i "%~6" -i "%~7" -i "%~8" -filter_complex "[0:a][1:a][2:a][3:a][4:a][5:a][6:a][7:a]amerge=inputs=8[aout]" -map "[aout]" -c:a pcm_s24le "%Destination%\7.1\%~n1"_7.1Merge.wav
shift
shift
shift
shift
shift
shift
shift
shift
if not [%1]==[] goto loop

I typically output to wav for this, and convert to flac using eac3to. eac3to is able to convert wav to flac, even for file sizes larger than the 2or 4GB limit for wav.