LORInternal & CanonicalAudio folders

[GregShoop]

I'm doing some cleanup on my computers, I bought a new one and my old one is replacing my old dedicated show computer.  I'm trying to clean up duplicate copies of music, sequences and other "stuff."  I have lots of backups of everything, too many in fact.  I found a great set of tools called dupeGuru which found a bunch of duplicate music in LORInternal CanonicalAudio folders.  Experience has taught me to not mess with internal program folders like this but I am curious about the purpose of these folders?

Any insight would be helpful.

[bob]

Before saying what it's for, I just want to say that the most important takeaway is "Just leave the LORInternal folder be, and don't worry about it".

An audio or video file can be made in all sorts of different ways.  There are MP3 files, WAV files, WMA files, all sorts of things.  They're all different than each other.  Beyond that, even two things that are both (for example) "MP3" can actually be very, very different things... they can be encoded at different sampling bitrates, they can have a different number of audio channels (mono or stereo for example), and lots and lots of other potential differences that can make two MP3 files that sound just alike to a human ear actually look extremely different than each other to a computer program.  There are a crazy number of different possible variations of how a media file might look to a computer, even without any significant human-noticeable difference in how it sounds.  And sometimes these differences can cause actual problems during sequencing, too (you may know of the "constant bit rate" versus "variable bit rate" problem, for example).

For reasons like this, one of the first things we do when you point us to a media file is that we make what we call a "canonical" version of the file.  Basically it's a version in one specific format.  It will sound the same to a human ear, but our programs will know exactly what format it will be in.  So it's a lot less work for our programs to understand it, and we know it will not have certain problematic characteristics (like VBR).

We store these things in the LORInternal\CanonicalAudio folder.  It's intended as a behind-the-scenes kind of thing - other than out of curiosity, there should be no reason why a user would have to interact with it, or even to know it's there.