Generating .frd and .zma files from REW for use with Passive Crossover Designer

[robotc]

To use Passive Crossover Designer (or the Windows version, WinPCD) requires that you import the speaker frequency response as an .frd file or the impedance curve as a .zma file. The instructions for REW explain how to export your measurements as text files and state that the format is compatible with .frd and .zma files.

However I could not generate files from REW in a form that Passive Crossover Designer would recognise and I could not find an explanation how to do this on the web. After a bit of playing around I worked it out and I thought it might be useful for others if I posted how I did it.

Open the measurement you want to export from REW. Click the File Menu and then click Export and then ‘Measurement as text’. When you name the file you must add the file extension to the name. For example a woofer frequency file would be named woofer.frd
​

If you don’t do this the files generated by REW will by default have a .txt extension and Passive Crossover Designer or WinPCD will not recognise them.

I am running Windows 7 Home Premium edition and by default the file extensions are not shown in file names. I found it useful to change the computer settings so I could see the file types.

To do this, go to Start/ Control Panel/Folder Options and select View. Scroll through the advanced settings to ‘Hide extensions for known file types’ and unclick the box.​

This will mean all your files will now show their type eg .doc .pdf .txt etc

I hope this information helps people with using these excellent programs.

Robert