From the time we started Message Banking, we have wanted the highest quality recording.  The reasons are numerous including:

1.  If done proactively, the end technology (should the messages be needed) has not been identified.   Given, in our experience some people have message banked over years before their messages are used, we want to be cautious and be sure the recording format used fits the technology of the future.

2. If tech of the future requires high quality recordings, .wav will fit the bill.  You can make .wav a lower quality but making a lower quality into a .wav (by changing the tag) does not really increase the quality

3. We now have several people who are incorporating their banked messages in to their second or third technology where by a current SGD has been used for four years and now a new SGD is acquired.    We’ve been able to incorporate the banked messages from seven years ago into each technology without trouble.

4. Some recording qualities cannot be incorporated into certain technologies.   The .wav format gives you maximum flexibility and will not require a technology identified at the time of need by a good clinical feature match to be eliminated because it will not accommodate the banked file format.

5. With the now hundreds of people who have message banked hundreds or even several thousand messages each through our program over more than a decade, we have had no difficulty merging the .wav files into the tech of choice.  Depending on the SGD it has sometimes been more labor intensive than others.   Fortunately there is a growing trend with developers/manufacturers to support auto population.

Best,

John

John M. Costello

Director, Augmentative Communication Program and 

ALS Augmentative Communication Program

Boston Children's Hospital

781.216.2220

781 216 2252 fax

www.childrenshospital.org/acp

www.childrenshospital.org/ALSaugcomm

FACEBOOK: www.facebook.org/acpchboston

TWITTER:  ACP/ALS ACP

                                   @costello_j

From: <xxxxxx@alsa.simplelists.com> on behalf of "McCaffrey, Julia" <xxxxxx@cshs.org>
Reply-To: "xxxxxx@alsa.simplelists.com" <xxxxxx@alsa.simplelists.com>
Date: Thursday, May 25, 2017 at 3:12 PM
To: "xxxxxx@alsa.simplelists.com" <xxxxxx@alsa.simplelists.com>
Subject: best audio file format for message banking

Is it still true that .WAV files are the best audio format to use when completing message banking?  If so, why?  Clients often ask me this, and I generally answer that it has to do with compression and sound quality recorded in a WAV file (less compressed/better quality) versus MP3 or MP4 (more compressed/poorer quality).

I recognize that a sound engineer may be able to hear the difference between a WAV and MP3/MP4 recording, but is it a difference that truly matters for SGD speech output intelligibility? 

Thanks in advance. 

Julia McCaffrey, MS, CCC-SLP

Speech Language Pathologist III

Cedars Sinai ALS Clinic

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