You are not a registered member of Norwich Darkside yet!
Until you register, you will not be able to reply to posts, or start new topics! The Norwich Darkside forums are the best place in Norfolk to get exposure for your band, find all the latest music news and reviews, share your experiences of local gigs, and become a member of the biggest music community in East Anglia. Registration is free, quick and will also remove this annoying box!Register Now
This may sound like a dumb question, but, what is the ideal Hz and bit rate for songs that I want to upload onto the net. i.e, keeping fairly good sound quality, but not having to wait ages for just one song to upload.
Joined: Apr 19, 2005 Posts: 5794 Location: At the bottom of the garden, amongst the birds and the bees
Mongoose wrote:
This may sound like a dumb question, but, what is the ideal Hz and bit rate for songs that I want to upload onto the net. i.e, keeping fairly good sound quality, but not having to wait ages for just one song to upload.
Firstly, you don't mean Hz - Hz is just unit for the frequency of a wave, it's not relevant.
What you probably mean is sampling rate. For audio CDs, it's 44.1kHz - you don't get a choice. For DVD audio, it's normally 96kHz - though it can go up to 192kHz. MP3 can be either 32, 44.1 and 48 kHz, but in practise almost all of them are 44.1kHz (simply because most MP3s are ripped from audio CDs).
Bit rate - obviously the higher the better. 128kbit/s is the absolute minimum you should think about using, and used to be the web standard. Most sites still use that (MySpace actually uses 96kbit/s, which is why it sounds so bad). 320kbit/s is the maximum, but the files are big. The best bet is to go for 160kbit/s - maybe 192 if you really want to spoil your listeners.
The best option though is to encode your files using Variable Bit Rate (VBR) - the idea is that the quality stays the same, but the bit rate changes. If you encode like that, and set the quality to 70% or 7/10, you normally end up with reasonably sized files that are pretty good quality.
It's also often worth encoding at 2 quality levels/bit rates (say 60/6 and 70/7 or 160kbit/s and 192kbit/s) and seeing if there's any major difference - some source material will let you get away with lower rates with no real loss in quality. If you're actually mixing stuff yourself, putting a gentle high-pass on the final mix at around 11kHz can let you get away with lower quality encoding, as it's above that range where you get the compression artefacts that male them sound bad.
Still having problems. I exported the track at 22 khz and 16 bit, the file size is about 21.1 MB. Myspace says this is still too large to upload. How do I make it smaller?
How long is the track? You should be focusing on the kbps measurement, not the kHz measurement. kHz should be set to 44.1 or 48 ideally, and the kbps measurement to either 128 or 160 (to be honest myspace compresses the shit out of whatever you put up there so 128kbps should be fine). Using this compression you should find an output filesize of around 1mb per minute.
What program are you using to encode the file? iTunes is pretty much the easiest way to create myspace quality MP3s.
Still having problems. I exported the track at 22 khz and 16 bit, the file size is about 21.1 MB. Myspace says this is still too large to upload. How do I make it smaller?
OK, all I'm doing is exporting a track out of cubase. It only gives me the option to change the hz and bit. I've done this before and uploaded it to myspace, but for some reason its not working this time. Once the track is out of cubase I don't know what else I can do to it. The tracks are around about 4-5 minutes.
Check the file extension. I assume you're using a PC? In the windows explorer folder window, click on the "tools" drop down menu, then click "folder options". Under the "view" tab, untick the "hide extensions for known file types" box.
Chances are if you've got a 30mb file on your hands for 5 minutes you've got a WAV or a seriously uncompressed AIFF or even PCM file. If this is the case, open the track up in iTunes.
In the "preferences" menu, find the "import settings" button. Click on it, and make sure it's set to import MP3 files at 128kbps. Now find your track in iTunes, right-click it, and click "import MP3 version". Ta-da!
I've never used itunes before. Is there any way of exporting it from cubase in a smaller size? or, any way to make it smaller on my PC without having to download any program from the net?
Like Luke says, check the extension. Are you sure you've exported an MP3 file from Cubase...? If not, can you see an option to choose MP3 when you export? Otherwise you'll have to use something else like Audacity (or iTunes or whatever) to do the conversion. (If you Google cubase mp3 export you'll find videos and stuff which should explain the procedure...)
Joined: Apr 19, 2005 Posts: 5794 Location: At the bottom of the garden, amongst the birds and the bees
Luke_Vanguard wrote:
Chances are if you've got a 30mb file on your hands for 5 minutes you've got a WAV or a seriously uncompressed AIFF or even PCM file.
Almost all WAV and AIFF files are PCM files. I've never used a DAW that lets you import raw-header PCM files, as there aren't many programs that will play them - whereas WAVs are the Windows default (and AIFF the Apple equivalent).
Unless the song is *really* long, 20Mb is almost certainly not an MP3 - and if the only options you get are "Hz" (which, as I explained is the sample rate) and "Bit", you're almost certainly exporting to WAV - in which case, like I said, 44.1khz, 16 bit is almost universally the standard as that's what CDs are.
48kHz MP3s won't play in some software, and I'd put money on MySpace not liking them. That's not even taking into account the fact that you've almost certainly recorded in 44.1kHz, so exporting at 48kHz doesn't gain you anything. 44.1kHz is the standard, so stick to it.
It's also really dumb to suggest using lower quality when you know they're going to get compressed again by MySpace - the better quality you put into MySpace, the better the quality coming out. The reason so many MySpace tracks sound terrible is because people upload versions that already sound bad, so when they're re-encoded you end up with artefacts on top of artefacts and they sound terrible. If you upload 320kbps MP3s, MySpace doesn't sound significantly worse than anything else.
I'm pretty sure Cubase doesn't even give you the option to export to MP3 (at least it didn't up to version 4, I've not used 5) - you have to pay a huge license fee to include the MP3 codecs with your software, so most DAWs don't bother out of the box.
So basically:
The best option is to export WAVs from Cubase (44.1kHz, 16bit), and download something like WinLAME to encode the files. 44.1kHz, 16bit gives files that are roughly 10Mb per minute - so they will be pretty big.
The LAME encoder is the best MP3 encoder there is, simple as. Don't bother with iTunes - like most Apple stuff it's bloated, inefficient, doesn't conform to normal standards, and takes over everything on your computer. WinLAME is tiny, free, and really easy to use - you open it up, drag the file onto it, choose your encoding options and click go. The resulting files will be smaller too, because the LAME encoder is more efficient than Apple's one. At 160kbps, MP3s are just over 1/10th the size of the original WAV file - around 1.1-1.3Mb per minute.
If you still have trouble, PM me and I'll give you a proper step-by-step from exporting the files onwards.
48kHz MP3s won't play in some software, and I'd put money on MySpace not liking them. That's not even taking into account the fact that you've almost certainly recorded in 44.1kHz, so exporting at 48kHz doesn't gain you anything. 44.1kHz is the standard, so stick to it.
Actually 48kHz is the standard for audio post, just so y'know Plus any DAW will let you set the kHz and bitrate manually, so it's not in any way certain he'd have recorded at 44.1.
You can export Linear PCM audio from editing systems such as Avid, usually in an MXF wrapper. I haven't used Cubase so I'm not really up on which formats it does or doesn't export, just suggesting options. At no point has Mongoose actually specified any details about the file other than the filesize, I'm just trying to eke out some more info!
Also there's nothing wrong with iTunes, you just don't like Apple
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum
Plus any DAW will let you set the kHz and bitrate manually, so it's not in any way certain he'd have recorded at 44.1.
