Dale Driver
New member
Hi. Do you have knowledge about the layout and structure of a Zoom project file that you could share with me?
Specifically, I'm looking for information about the Livetrak L-20 project file (L20PRJDATA.ZDT) and how each track in a project is mapped to it's corresponding .wav file. I suspect there are great similarities between the different project files used by the various Zoom devices.
I'm a long time Zoom H2 and Audacity user. I'm a very new Livetrak L-20 user.
I'm also a guitar player, vocalist, sound person, and now recording engineer in a 4-piece band.
With the H2, I make stereo recordings and then move the SD card to a laptop where I use Audacity to edit the starts and stops of each song and then normalize them. One recording usually contains multiple songs and adding labels and exporting based on labels makes it very convenient to split out the individual "songs". This has produced some great (to us) recordings of band practices, rehearsals and performances but I've often wished for more than 2 tracks.
Enter the Livetrak. I record each input along with a stereo room mic. When we record, we typically let the recorder run and each L-20 "project" will contain one or more "songs". After recording, I want to mix the "songs" on the L-20 but want to make those same Audacity edits (starts/stops and normalize) prior to mixing. Luckily this is as easy as it is with the H2 except there are more tracks. I move the SD card to a laptop, import the project tracks into Audacity, make the edits and export each track as a .wav file without changing the track file names; e.g. what was imported from TRACK01.wav is exported to TRACK01.wav. As an aside, I also change the default YYMMDD_HHMMSS project name(s) to (creative) song names that respect the 13-character limit. This renaming is so much easier to do on a computer than on the L-20 and makes it much easier to find a song in the list of projects.
Getting the edited tracks back into the L-20 is not nearly as simple or quick as I had hoped. When I move the SD card from the laptop to the L-20, the L-20 will load a renamed project but it won't load/find/play the edited tracks, even though the track file names didn't change. Zoom support has confirmed that “By reorganizing the project on the SD card the L-20 is not able to read the project as the file structure of a project is set up in a very specific way for the L-20 to interpret.” I requested the L20PRJDATA.ZDT layout from Zoom support but they didn't respond.
This “getting edited tracks back into the L-20” is the root of my request for information about the .ZDT file format. I would dearly love to edit/zap the L20PRJDATA.ZDT file with the information it needs to find my edited tracks. I’ve been comparing an “empty” (initial) project file with that same project file after my tracks are imported. I can see that the file content is changed but without knowledge of structure and content it’s a fruitless exercise.
At present, to get my edited tracks into the L-20 for mixing, I need to create a new project for each song and then import/assign each edited song track one at a time. This works but is pretty time consuming and somewhat human error prone. If I don't again rename the new projects to be song names, I need to keep a manual project<->song cross reference. A recording session easily yields 20 songs of 12 tracks each... this is 240 tracks that need to be imported, assigned and confirmed, one track at a time... when doing hundreds of imports it's easy to miss one or two (don't ask how I know this)... our band was originally hoping to record and mix each of our weekly practices and any shows that we play... we may need to rethink this.
Are you using a Zoom Livetrak to mix songs? Do you have a solution for getting your edited tracks back into the L-20 that doesn’t involve importing tracks one at a time?
Thank you in advance for any insight you can provide.
Dale Driver
Specifically, I'm looking for information about the Livetrak L-20 project file (L20PRJDATA.ZDT) and how each track in a project is mapped to it's corresponding .wav file. I suspect there are great similarities between the different project files used by the various Zoom devices.
I'm a long time Zoom H2 and Audacity user. I'm a very new Livetrak L-20 user.
I'm also a guitar player, vocalist, sound person, and now recording engineer in a 4-piece band.
With the H2, I make stereo recordings and then move the SD card to a laptop where I use Audacity to edit the starts and stops of each song and then normalize them. One recording usually contains multiple songs and adding labels and exporting based on labels makes it very convenient to split out the individual "songs". This has produced some great (to us) recordings of band practices, rehearsals and performances but I've often wished for more than 2 tracks.
Enter the Livetrak. I record each input along with a stereo room mic. When we record, we typically let the recorder run and each L-20 "project" will contain one or more "songs". After recording, I want to mix the "songs" on the L-20 but want to make those same Audacity edits (starts/stops and normalize) prior to mixing. Luckily this is as easy as it is with the H2 except there are more tracks. I move the SD card to a laptop, import the project tracks into Audacity, make the edits and export each track as a .wav file without changing the track file names; e.g. what was imported from TRACK01.wav is exported to TRACK01.wav. As an aside, I also change the default YYMMDD_HHMMSS project name(s) to (creative) song names that respect the 13-character limit. This renaming is so much easier to do on a computer than on the L-20 and makes it much easier to find a song in the list of projects.
Getting the edited tracks back into the L-20 is not nearly as simple or quick as I had hoped. When I move the SD card from the laptop to the L-20, the L-20 will load a renamed project but it won't load/find/play the edited tracks, even though the track file names didn't change. Zoom support has confirmed that “By reorganizing the project on the SD card the L-20 is not able to read the project as the file structure of a project is set up in a very specific way for the L-20 to interpret.” I requested the L20PRJDATA.ZDT layout from Zoom support but they didn't respond.
This “getting edited tracks back into the L-20” is the root of my request for information about the .ZDT file format. I would dearly love to edit/zap the L20PRJDATA.ZDT file with the information it needs to find my edited tracks. I’ve been comparing an “empty” (initial) project file with that same project file after my tracks are imported. I can see that the file content is changed but without knowledge of structure and content it’s a fruitless exercise.
At present, to get my edited tracks into the L-20 for mixing, I need to create a new project for each song and then import/assign each edited song track one at a time. This works but is pretty time consuming and somewhat human error prone. If I don't again rename the new projects to be song names, I need to keep a manual project<->song cross reference. A recording session easily yields 20 songs of 12 tracks each... this is 240 tracks that need to be imported, assigned and confirmed, one track at a time... when doing hundreds of imports it's easy to miss one or two (don't ask how I know this)... our band was originally hoping to record and mix each of our weekly practices and any shows that we play... we may need to rethink this.
Are you using a Zoom Livetrak to mix songs? Do you have a solution for getting your edited tracks back into the L-20 that doesn’t involve importing tracks one at a time?
Thank you in advance for any insight you can provide.
Dale Driver
