What is track interleave ?

I am way out of my league on this one (but that never stopped me before :) ).

I thought interleave referred to how music (data) was stored on the hard drive. In other words, if you have 10 tracks of music, the music is not stored one continuous track after the other. Rather, pieces of each track are "interleaved" or woven. This reduces the amount of jumping around that is required by the read head on the hard drive, and theroetically provides better performance.

Well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it (at least until someone smarter comes along).
 
From the Digital Performer site:

This soundbite actually refers to two sound files, because Digital Performer uses split stereo files instead of one interleaved file. Split stereo means that your stereo mix is split into a pair of mono files, with '.L' (left) and '.R' (right) suffixes. Most other software likes to see interleaved stereo files, in which the individual sample numbers for the left and right channels are interleaved.
 
if the software writes two separate mono files from a double output, after one or more individual tracks are passed thru an massive algorithm for summing in a software mixer. Is the advantage found in speed of continuous seek-read of two continuous mono files which are rendered images of 1/2 interleaved stereo track and not having to skip from interleave point to interleave point. Or is reading the interleaves and not 2 rendered (via algorithm) mono images of the interleave of many files yielding truer and more accurate audio ?


let's go guys, take that selenium and Vitamin E and pushhh.....

I dont havea clue myself, i`m just really curious... :)
 
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Very curious here as well, I've exporting my files from Cubase as interleaved and mastering in wavelab, and they sound pretty good to me, but I'd be very curious to know which type of file offers technically superior quality.
 
I've noticed that if I switch to interleaved and there are horns on one of the tracks,the horns almost disappear..:eek:
 
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