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little dude production question

mr.brettmr.brett 678 Posts
edited October 2006 in Strut Central
I'm not a producer, but i've been making microwavable edits recently. I was wondering if someone could tell me how bad it is to put an mp3 into a program like sound forge and then output an mp3 when you're done with your project. Obviously it can't be good to compress an already compressed file, but i was wondering what you all thought about this issue.

  Comments

  • bthavbthav 1,538 Posts
    youre technically not compressing an already compressed file, youre upsampling an mp3 to a .wav or whatever (if you dont see this, your comp is doing this temporarily so you can work with the file). then when you are done, you are recompressing it.

    technically, if you use the SAME converter that you originally compressed with to upsample with the SAME pref conversion, then you should be okay as long as you go back to the same file specs as the original.

    but the chances of that happening are slim to none. so when this doesnt happen, you are basically taking an already 2nd generation file from the original source and making a 3rd generation file which for the anal retentive is .

    im from the camp of, if is sounds on a system you trust, then stop in'.


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    this concludes yet another dorky message from bthav.
  • HawkeyeHawkeye 896 Posts
    Try to get an original copy of that tune instead of an MP3.

    MP3 sucks !!!!!!!
  • dCastillodCastillo 1,963 Posts
    just leave it as a wav after editing it
  • OkemOkem 4,617 Posts
    Get cooledit (or whatever its called now), its much better. And you can just edit it as an mp3.
  • bobbydeebobbydee 849 Posts
    Get cooledit (or whatever its called now), its much better. And you can just edit it as an mp3.

    It's called adobe audition now.

    What bthav is saying, is that if your editing it at all, your comp has decompressed it to wav anwyay.
  • bthavbthav 1,538 Posts
    yea, the .mp3 is not a editable format. any program that says it lets you edited .mp3s does it by storing an upsampled version of it temporarily and then dumping that file later while updating or possible saving an new mp3. try an edit a set (hour+) that's an .mp3 with less than a gig space on your HD and watch what happens. happend to me last weekend. needless to say, i deleted alot of files that needed to go

  • BrianBrian 7,618 Posts
    Ok, here's some stuff.

    Like someone mentioned earlier in the thread, whenever you open an .mp3 in any sort of audio editing app, it decodes it to a .wav. Most of the time this will be okay, but you may run into errors ocasionally. I use a combination of LAME and RazorLAME to decode MP3s before opening them in any sort of audio app and I have not run into problems in 5+ years. After that, you do your thing or whatever.

    Another thing you need to watch out for is bit rate. Re-encoding MP3s is one thing, but you really do not want to change the bit rate to a higher one than it originally was. If you are using downloaded MP3s, I suggest getting "scene" releases which are just releases organized groups put out. Scene groups have encoding standards so you know the file you are working with should be decent enough to work with.

    Beyond that, the only thing I can suggest is buying CD singles and work with .wav files from those or work with vinyl.
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