Audio Ease has released BarbaBatch 4.0, a professional sample rate and file format conversion utility. It is now compatible with Mac OSX.

The BarbaBatch user interface will look and feel familiar to previous BarbaBatch users, but it has become a lot more powerfull with the introduction resizable windows, tables displaying sound file information and unlimited undo and redo. Conversion definitions can be shared by dragging them in and out of the conversion list, and there is an automatic conversion naming feature.

Support for many file formats has been added, moving BarbaBatch further into telephony audio (CCITT files, Wave u-law and a-law, pika and vap files) and into mastering (redbook audio CD images, including extraction of separate songs, Sonic Solutions 32 bit files, Broadcast Wave (bwf) Linear PCM files, including annotations and timestamps)

Along with this release, an on-line comparison of professional samplerate converters is published at http://www.audioease.com/sr

The test was published to show off the quality of Barbabatch’s award winning samplerate conversion algorithm and to make anyone aware of the differences between samplerate conversion quality in many professional packages today by means of audio examples and theoretical explanations.

“We have noticed a higher demand for quality samplerate conversion now that the ears in the industry are growing familiar with 96 kHz projects.” Says Arjen van der Schoot, cofounder of Audio Ease. “Most of those projects will have to go to 44.1 or 48 kHz at some point, so top quality conversion is more in demand than ever before. This critical type conversion, halving of the samplerate, leaves a full octave to be cut with anti aliasing filters. If the filter’s shape is wrong, aliasing is scattered throughout the entire audible band. Unfortunately this is common practice in professional samplerate converters today, as is shown in the on-line comparison”.

BarbaBatch v4 costs $395. It is a US $169 upgrade for previous BarbaBatch owners.

BarbaBatch and its downloadable demo is available from the Audio Ease site.