This is a follow-up to a post with the same subject in "Live Sound -> Live Sound -> StudioLive Series III". I cannot post to that forum as I don't have the proper registrations under my account. But I wanted to post my findings in case anyone else can benefit from it.

viewtopic.php?f=338&t=38138&hilit=opening+sd+card+recording+studio+one

The issue identified in the post is that the capture recorded to an SD card in a StudioLive Series III mixer cannot be "completely" opened in Studio One. While the tracks are imported, the actual data scene "metadata" is not imported. @wahlerstudios identified that while the documentation says "Capture Sessions" are supported in Studio One it appears that the term "Capture" is overloaded. The actual "Capture Sessions" that are fully supported are those that come from the "Capture 3" software when connected to a StudioLive Series III mixer. @wahlerstudios has a post in StudioLive Series III Tips & Tricks called Opening SD Card Recording in Studio One that goes through the process of creating a Capture 3 session from a SD Card Recording, but this still requires the computer running Capture 3 to be connected to the StudioLive Series III mixer.

viewtopic.php?f=338&t=39604&p=233218&hilit=opening+sd+card+recording+studio+one#p233218

I will note here that in just changing the .scn file extension to .scene accomplishes some of the goal, but at least two key pieces of information is absent: track names, and track colours.

The goal of this post is to identify the differences between a Capture 3 session and a StudioLive Series III SD card session. Ultimately, this can be used to create a conversion script for taking an SD card capture and creating a Studio One compatible capture without the need for connection to the StudioLive mixer.

When Capture 3 is connected to a StudioLive Series III mixer to create a capture, the key outputs are as follows:

- a .capture file that is in XML format
- a .scene file that is in JSON format
- a folder containing one or more .wav files with the captured audio signals from the board

When a StudioLive Series III mixer creates a capture to an inserted SD card, the key outputs are as follows:

- a .capture file that is in XML format
- a .scn file that is in JSON format
- a .cnfg file that is in JSON format
- a folder containing one or more .wav files with the captured audio signals from the board

This looks very similar, and they are, but there are slight differences that cause problems for the direct loading of the SD card capture into Studio One.

First, looking at the .capture files it can be seen where the potential difference lies. Just looking at file size, the Capture 3 .capture is larger than the StudioLive .capture. Capture 3 (and it appears Studio One) likes to use the .capture to store and recall more of the information than StudioLive does. The StudioLive .capture is very utilitarian, basically outputting links to the .wav files (individually called AudioEvent), grouping those .wav files into tracks (individually called AudioTrack). Each AudioTrack receives a generic "Track #" name where the # is replaced with the input number that the track was recorded from. It appears that all inputs are present in the .capture regardless of whether those tracks were selected for recording. If a track was not selected for recording, that AudioTrack would have no AudioEvents associated with it.

When Capture 3 creates a .capture file, it includes additional metadata that are more relevant to a DAW than it for a mixer, including loopstart, loopend, playhead, playmode, tempo, timesignature, and EditorState. But more crucially for this post, it includes richer information for the AudioTracks, including setting the AudioTrack name to the name that is shown on the mixer, and recording the colour (or color) of the AudioTrack.

Next, as was pointed to by @wahlerstudios, looking at the .scn and .scene files, again we see that the Capture 3 .scene has more sections than the StudioLive .scn. Since the StudioLive also wrote out a .cnfg, looking into that it appears that some of the missing sections in the .scn are present in the .cnfg. I note that there is some overlap too, but I have not dug into the details here as of yet (and they might not be relevant).

If we combine the .scn and .cnfg, the following sections are still missing (as compared to the Capture 3 .scene):

advancedscenefilters
projectfilters
permissions
presets
mapping
mastersetion
mutegroup
userencoders
dawuserfunctions
outputpatchrouter
stageboxsetup
users

There is actually a section in the .cnfg that doesn't appear in the .scene:

userfunctions

In looking through the data I have, there doesn't really appear to be anything in the missing sections that is really needed for the purposes of this post. So they'll be ignored.

The key thing to look at is in the .scn. The .scn has a section called "line". This is where that key data is located that Studio One appears to be trying to grab from the XML instead of the .scene. In the "line" one can find the track/channel names (called "username") as well as the "color". These can be brought into the corresponding .capture AudioTrack element. There are a couple things to look out for though when doing this. First is with the "color". PreSonus has handled the specification of "color" in three different ways. In .capture a hexidecimal string is used (e.g. "#FF0000FF") to represent a 32 bit integer in little endian format. In a Capture 3 .scene a 32 bit signed integer is used. And finally in a StudioLive SD card .scn a 32 bit unsigned integer is used.

Second is the track name and the handling of stereo linked tracks. First a note on stereo linked tracks. Capture 3 handles these by creating a stereo .wav and only having one AudioTrack to represent the two channels (this is signaled by setting speaker="3" in the AudioTrack). StudioLive instead captures two mono .wav files, keeping the tracks separate in the .capture (e.g. two AudioTrack tags; one for each channel). In the .scn stereo linked channels are identified by a "link" entry that is 0 for no link and 1 for linked. Also, their "name"s will be the same. Maybe by coincidence, but in the data I've seen there is also a "linkmaster" entry that seems to indicate 0 for the right channel and 1 for the left channel (again this is preliminary and the designation of left and right may be my arbitrary assignment as the "pan" and "stereopan" may become of more importance here).

Armed with this information, it may be possible to create a script to convert a SD card capture to one that can be loaded into Studio One with "all" settings maintained without the need to connect to the mixer.