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SOFA multichannel IR support

Spat
#1

Hello,

I am experimenting with spherical array Impulse Responses from different datasets and surprisingly none of the multiple datasets that I found works with SPAT5.2.7. It may be some misunderstanding with changing conventions, but would be great to find anything that works with SPAT.

Maybe I am doing something wrong, but here are the datasets that I tried, so perhaps it is worth looking into the file SOFA support:

  1. 2012/2020 " A Spatial Audio Impulse Response Compilation Captured at the WDR Broadcast Studios" A Spatial Audio Impulse Response Compilation Captured at the WDR Broadcast Studios | Zenodo (uses SingleRoomDRIR convention)
  2. 2019 “Dataset: Eigenmike-DRIRs, …” Dataset: Eigenmike-DRIRs, KEMAR 45BA-BRIRs, RIRs and 360° pictures captured at five positions of a small conference room | Zenodo (uses SingleRoomDRIR convention)
    …

I am planning to learn how to extract wav files from SOFA DRIRs and encode wavs into SOFA files, but so far it seems I need to use Python or Matlab for this. When I see that SPAT reads some SOFA RIRs, then I can test encoding of wav RIRs into SOFA format that works with SPAT.

Thank you very much.

#2

Had to split list in to the second post, because new users can not post more than 2 links :slight_smile:

  1. 2021 “A High-Resolution Spatial Room Impulse Response Database” https://zenodo.org/record/5031335#.YpkUB4RBxhE (uses SingleRoomDRIR convention)
  2. 2021 “A dataset of measured spatial room impulse responses for the transition between coupled rooms” A dataset of measured spatial room impulse responses for the transition between coupled rooms | Zenodo (uses SingleRoomDRIR convention)
#3

Hi,

Thanks for reporting.
I had a quick look at some of the files from these 4 repos.
Besides the fact that they use deprecated conventions (such as SingleRoomDRIR or MultiSpeakerBRIR), it appears that none of them (at least the ones I tried) are valid SOFA files.
They violate various mandatory criteria from the SOFA standard. Therefore Spat is unhappy.

(I admit it would be great if Spat provides more informative error messages, though)

If you get in touch with the authors of these files, I could let them know what is – in my opinion – incorrect w.r.t the SOFA specs.

Best,
T.

#4

Thank you for checking that out already!

I understand that SingleRoomDRIR and even MultiSpeakerBRIR conventions are depreciated even though apparently they are still being used and supported by Matlab SOFA API. SOFA format is quite bad when it comes to consistency - so many conventions, revisions, multiple coordinate systems plus missing features in different implementations that this is expected. As I see in “spat5.sofa.infos”, SPAT5 should support SingleRoomSRIR convention, but I did not manage to find any documentation or examples for what it takes to load and convolve SingleRoomSRIRs with for example 2ch stereo content? In fact even Google search for “SingleRoomSRIR” provides almost no results, so maybe no-one uses this convention yet?

If there is an example SOFA RIR file that works with either “spat5.singleroomdrir” or in a more up to date example, I would use sofar to convert these less perfect SingleRoomDRIR files into a format that works with SPAT.

thank you,
Sergejs