AHM WAV playback tries to play metadata = click/distortion

AHM AHM Troubleshooting
1

Hello

I was getting nasty clicks at the end of WAV files. I’ve traced it to the presence of various metadata in WAV files, which can include things like loudness values, encoding history, start timecode etc. DAW software typically writes this information when bouncing down. Lots of apps do. My speculation is that the AHM is trying to “play” these few bytes at the end of the file, when it should be ignoring them.

Here is a zip download with two short WAV files of identical content. Both written by Magix Sequoia. The only difference is that one of them has had the metadata stripped out of it, and is therefore 1KB smaller.

AHM_metadata_clicks.zip

Mediainfo reports from each:

Clicky version with metadata

General
Complete name                            : F:\Research & Development\Speaker-ID\Bounces\Speaker-ID-4816_2ch_with_metadata.wav
Format                                   : Wave
Format settings                          : PcmWaveformat
File size                                : 1 023 KiB
Duration                                 : 5 s 449 ms
Overall bit rate mode                    : Constant
Overall bit rate                         : 1 538 kb/s
Encoded date                             : 2025-03-12 13:58:35
Encoding settings                        : A=PCM,F=48000,W=16,M=stereo,T=Sequoia software

Audio
Format                                   : PCM
Format settings                          : Little / Signed
Codec ID                                 : 1
Duration                                 : 5 s 449 ms
Bit rate mode                            : Constant
Bit rate                                 : 1 536 kb/s
Channel(s)                               : 2 channels
Sampling rate                            : 48.0 kHz
Bit depth                                : 16 bits
Stream size                              : 1 022 KiB (100%)
LoudnessValue                            : -22.97
LoudnessRange                            : 3.00
MaxTruePeakLevel                         : -7.52
MaxMomentaryLoudness                     : -19.53
MaxShortTermLoudness                     : -24.31

Metadata stripped

General
Complete name                            : F:\Research & Development\Speaker-ID\Bounces\Speaker-ID-4816_2ch_no_metadata.wav
Format                                   : Wave
Format settings                          : PcmWaveformat
File size                                : 1 022 KiB
Duration                                 : 5 s 449 ms
Overall bit rate mode                    : Constant
Overall bit rate                         : 1 536 kb/s

Audio
Format                                   : PCM
Format settings                          : Little / Signed
Codec ID                                 : 1
Duration                                 : 5 s 449 ms
Bit rate mode                            : Constant
Bit rate                                 : 1 536 kb/s
Channel(s)                               : 2 channels
Sampling rate                            : 48.0 kHz
Bit depth                                : 16 bits
Stream size                              : 1 022 KiB (100%)

Hope this helps development.

Cheers

2

Thanks for reporting this - I’ve reproduced it here. We’ll investigate what’s happening!

3

Great, glad to hear it. By the way, BWFMetaEdit from the US Library of Congress is a great tool for inspecting and editing the various meta “chunks” in WAV files.

4

The Metadata in the first file isn’t normal metadata, it’s additional information.
Many software players for home computers can ignore the extra data for compatibility and can read some tags in the right way. But it depends on…

Some encoders put additional information into the INFO chunk without the correct format. Sometimes it is better to remove these extra information for compatibility reasons.

A different solution would be to enable broadcast wave support. Audio data is exactly the same, but metadata is standardized and allows much more information.

The loudness information for example is part of the broadcast wave file extension.