100 Things #74: Easily Save Measurements in Any Format

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SoundCheck offers flexible options for data processing, allowing measurement data to be saved in a variety of formats. For fast and reliable operation, saving data can be automated with autosave steps in a sequence. SoundCheck can save measurements to a .tdms file for including important metadata with your measurements, Excel for reporting test data and comparing results, text files for lightweight information transfers. and more. All of SoundCheck’s data including waveforms, results, curves, values can be saved in various formats.

Easily Save Measurements in Any Format

Learn more about saving data in different formats in SoundCheck

Learn more about supported data formats in SoundCheck for R&D, Production, and more.

Video Script:

It’s often useful to save your SoundCheck measurement data for statistical analysis, offline post processing, sharing with others, or saving to a database. SoundCheck offers multiple ways to easily save measurement data in many different formats. Let’s take a look!

When you’re running a SoundCheck sequence,  the memory list manages all the data generated. This includes curves, values, limit results and waveforms. This measurement data can be manually saved by right clicking the item in the SoundCheck’s memory list.

Curves, Values and Results can be saved as .dat (SoundCheck’s native binary data format), .txt, .MAT – that’s a MatLab file,  or .TDMS – that’s National Instruments’ structured binary file format. Multiple items can be selected and saved into a single file.

From the WFM tab, waveform data can also be saved directly as .wav, .wfm (SoundCheck’s native waveform), .txt, .MAT and .TDMS.

.TDMS is a new file format supported in SoundCheck 21 and later. TDMS not only supports system and user metadata, but the data is also a fast binary format, minimizing read and write times when a sequence is running. It can also be opened in Excel and Matlab using a converter plugin.

If you use SoundMap, SoundCheck’s time frequency analysis option, you can even save time frequency data directly to a .mat file for further analysis in MATLAB.

Naturally, saving data in a SoundCheck sequence can be automated. An autosave step in your sequence lets you automatically save to any of the formats I just demonstrated, plus an SQL database, and Excel. This makes saving data with each run of your sequence automatic, fast and easy. If you’re familiar with the WATS Test Data Management software, we’ve even developed a utility to convert SoundCheck generated text files directly into WATS for further analytics and process management.

So, as you can see, SoundCheck is supremely flexible when it comes to working with your existing lab or production line workflows, whether you’re someone who likes to run your own calculations and analytics in Matlab or Excel, or when you need fast, automated writing to your own custom database. For more details, check out the instructional videos on saving data in our “Tutorials” playlist.