Immersive Media Research (IMR) has announced the missing link for owners of Zoom’s H2, the first handheld surround-sound recorder.
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With four built-in microphones, the H2 captures 360-degree sound into two stereo wav files.
But until now, there was no easy way for H2 owners to share their recordings with the world. That\'s why IMR has come up with the Vortex Zoom Encoder, a program for Mac OS X and Windows.
Vortex Zoom Encoder converts the H2’s dual-stereo recordings into standard formats. H2 owners simply drop the two stereo wavs onto the Vortex Zoom Encoder window and click one of three export buttons: DTS, Binaural, or 5.1 wav. More details on the output formats:
DTS DTS wav is the easiest surround-sound format to author: Users drag the 44.1kHz, 16-bit, 2-channel wav files to any cd-burning program and burn a cd as normal. They then play this special cd through the S/PDIF output on a cd player, computer, or Sony PlayStation 3 into a DTS-compatible home theater system. The signal automatically expands back into 5.1-channel surround sound.
Binaural Binaural wav employs IMR’s ImmersiveStereo™ technology to convert surround-sound recordings into a headphone experience. You can can transfer the resulting two-channel wav files to portable players, burn them to audio cd, or convert them to compressed formats such as mp3 for more portability.
5.1 wav This is is a six-channel, 44.1kHz interleaved wav file. Users can drop these files into the free Fraunhofer mp3 Surround Encoder. Files in this format are completely backward compatible. They play like normal stereo mp3s in standard players, but expand into 5.1 channels in mp3 Surround players such as Winamp. These 5.1 wav files also load into many DAWs and video editing programs.