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Converting MiniSEED to SDS

Have a directory of MiniSEED files from a field campaign, a datalogger dump or another tool? fdsn-rush convert sorts them into an SDS archive with one file per channel and UTC day, the same layout download produces.

fdsn-rush convert raw-data/ sds/

What it does

  1. Scan. raw-data/ is searched recursively. Every file that starts with a MiniSEED record is used, regardless of its extension. All other files are skipped.
  2. Split. Traces that cross midnight (UTC) are split into one piece per day.
  3. Write. Each piece is appended to its SDS day file under sds/, with 4096-byte records and STEIM compression.

Files are processed in parallel. A progress bar shows the scan and the conversion.

File names must contain a dot

The scan only considers files whose name contains a dot, such as station.mseed or GE.APE..HHZ.D.2026.244. Files without one, such as datafile, are ignored. Rename them before converting.

Options

--network CODE

Overwrite the network code of all traces. This is useful for campaign data recorded with a placeholder network:

fdsn-rush convert raw-data/ sds/ --network 2D
--steim 1|2
STEIM compression level (default 2).
--n-workers N
Number of files converted at the same time (default 64). Lower it on network file systems.

Things to know

Run each conversion once

convert appends to existing day files. If you convert the same input into the same output twice, every trace ends up in the archive twice. To redo a conversion, write to a new, empty directory.

  • Merging several input directories into one archive is fine, as long as each input is converted only once.
  • If a day file cannot be written, the error is logged and the file path is added to errors.txt in the output directory.
  • convert writes waveforms only. Get matching StationXML with fdsn-rush download --metadata-only if the stations are available from an FDSN server.