MP3 VS WMA

[Studioplayer]

A lot of musicians have been using mp3's for auditions and bedtracks. It's better to use wma's. The reason being is mp3 puts space in the beginning of your track and makes it difficult to line up properly with a wav or wma. Just thought I'd show an example. To make things easy and to have less headaches with alignment down the road it's always best to stick to wma or wav. Not sure what Mac uses.  This is for PC

This is the same file. Original wav converted to wma & mp3.

Hope this works 

Dave

[NickT]

Agreed Dave,

Thanks for the illustration.

Nick

[CosmicDolphin]

I'd never realised..

I double checked because I thought maybe it could be down to the  application and codec used , but I just looked at the new bed track I just posted today and compared the wav to the MP3 and there's a delay at the start of the MP3 of 24ms. 

That's enough to put the tight feel of some things out for sure.  I think they say you start to notice around 12ms + , but it depends on the instrument and style.  I haven't tried changing to WMA because I don't like Microsoft's domination of everything but I'll use it next time and have a look at the waveform.

Just out of interest I use Wavelab 4.0 to do all my converting, but there must be people who do it straight from the DAW and not all have a WMA option.

Good point and well made Dave !  Now get back to work 

CosmicDolphin

[Studioplayer]

I don't like Microsoft's domination of everything either but wma's do keep it in sync. It's easy enough to line up an mp3 but that just opens things up for error down the road. A few people have posted mp3's. Your not the only one dude. I thought a visual may help. 

Dave

[Gerk]

Actually, hate to burst the bubble, but wma does the same thing .. it's just often smaller amounts of padding.  All lossy compressed formats do this from what Ive seen, sometime just more hit and miss.  There's a thread on here that goes pretty deep on this subject.  The biggest problem with wma files is that not everyonce can read/convert them properly if you use the latest (windows only) version of the codecs.  If you are using people that are on mac or other non-windows systems make sure to save your wma's in a compatible (i.e. older) format

But that said ... If you want really accurate stuff you should honestly use Monkey Audio files -- which windows/mac/linux can all happily do.  They are a bit bigger, but you ensure that every "zero" is really located at 0:00 and they are truly losless.  wma's/mp3's are great for mixes or quick auditions, but I personally think all beds and tracks should be xfered with APE to ensure proper line-ups and all real parts should be played to a bed that came from an APE and not a padded format like wma/mp3.

Mark

[Studioplayer]

Ah man. Don't burst my bubble. And I thought Microsofts WMA's were infallible.  Some good points Mark. I was just getting at mp3's are really bad for trying to line up if you want to do a temporary mix. Ape is best of course but then we would have to max at Nicks server space.

This will obviously be an issue for as long as we are trying to cross platform as well as transfer files from one DAW to another.

Dave

[BassPlayer]

<soapbox>
I'm not compression guru but I tend to like wavpack better http://www.wavpack.com/ because it's open source, included in more and more linux distros and has some very nifty features. Pretty much a no brainer for me but some people still use ape so I have both. 99% of the time when  I send someone a self extracting wavpack archive they love not having to perform the extra step of uncompressing. 

Heres a comparison wiki and chart

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossless_comparison#Comparison_Table
</soapbox>

[Gerk]

wavepack looks neat, but they don't release any OSX binaries  ... which works ok for me, I don't mind compiling and using command line tools, but I prefer to stick with something that's more readily available and used.  Hell ogg is great too, but I use MP3 for the same reasons   Also in this day and age I would refuse to open anything that's self extracting on a windows box, no matter the source

Studioplayer:  It's not that big a differece going to using ae for the bed tracks really.  I'm doing it on a couple of project I'm doing and it works great.  It's only a couple of files that are marginally bigger.  MP#/wma are still fine for auditions and listening to mixes, so this would only be for beds people are going to track to (in addition to whatever tracks they submit).  Each to their own, but I've had bad experiences all around with compressed formats .. I was one of those guys that also insisited on using wav's before monkey audio became popular

[NickT]

Wma's/mp3's are great for mixes or quick auditions, but I personally think all beds and tracks should be xfered with APE to ensure proper line-ups and all real parts should be played to a bed that came from an APE and not a padded format like wma/mp3.

Mark

This is something I haven't thought about until now. How many times do we track to an MP3 or WMA as the bed?

All the time.

I can't tell you how many mixes I have done with ape's and they are off. Never thought about the bed source as being the problem. I figured it was the DAW difference.

THIS IS WHY A CLICK IS SO IMPORTANT! 

Nick

[BassPlayer]

wavepack looks neat, but they don't release any OSX binaries  ... which works ok for me, I don't mind compiling and using command line tools, but I prefer to stick with something that's more readily available and used.  Hell ogg is great too, but I use MP3 for the same reasons Wink  Also in this day and age I would refuse to open anything that's self extracting on a windows box, no matter the source Cheesy

Yea thats a bummer about OSX binaries but if someone is using Linux and doesnt know how to type

./configure ; make ;make install

then maybe they should not be using Linux

The think the thing that really intrigued me about wavpack was the whole hybrid thing whare you could create a lossy file and then recreate the lossless version from a 2nd file. I see many possiblities for storage there. Then again  I work at NetApp now so I should really be saying buy more storage systems

FWIW I think I remember that you have to know the secret link from Gerk to get the OSX version of MA. It does not seem apparent on the Monkeys Audio site.

hrm I've yet to have a problems with EXEs opening from mail or the web. /shugs

but I digress... Getting back on topic I think that doing bed tracks with apes or the lossless compressor of your choice is a good idea.  But hey I think it would be better to walk before we run and actually get click tracks in beds. Now that would be something....

[Gerk]

hehe yes, clicks would be a good start!   Followed by lossless beds (and I don't mean wma 'lossless'!) and I think we'll really be onto something here hehe.