Some devices, I've found, can play 4.0 files properly, and some can't. The fix for the latter is to add a silent Center (and/or LFE) channel.
I know how to add a channel using ,say, Audacity, on a per file basis. But I've got dozens of 4.0 files in my collection. Is there any software/workflow that can automatically batch-add a silent channel to them?
You could use the "remix" function in SoX. Add it to a GUI frontend such as Frontah to process many files in batch.
sox.exe "s4.wav" "s6.wav" remix 1 2 0 0 3 4
thanks, but how do I point Frontah to my flac.exe, sox.exe apps etc? The 'help' link is DOA , the readme is rudimentary and I don't see anything in setup.
For Frontah, the de/encoders have to be in a folder from %path% environment variable. IIRC, the SoX (https://sourceforge.net/projects/sox/files/sox/14.4.2/) Windows installer will add itself to the path. You can probably use another frontend, such as Foobar's file converter, but I've never done that.
Turns out someone developed a tool that does all this, and more. Music Media Helper . Windows only.
https://reva.blob.core.windows.net/mmh/publish.htm
For future reference, I'll mention Wave Wizard (https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=95265), which is a standalone win32 tool for channel mapping, among other options, such as merging multiple files and undoing the wave extensible header. A downside of it is that it doesn't support Sonic Foundry Wave64 format (multichannel files can get large), and you have to decompress inputs to WAV manually.
This good old tool has almost been forgotten by the web, I found a link here (https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=314022).
Apparently, the Media Helper requires .NET Framework, and there is no direct link of the actual program, and no description of it.
Music Media Helper is described here (https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/forums/index.php?threads/music-helper-useful-tools-for-music-videos-mch-audio.22693/#post-315629)