The 2012 MP3 curse.

[teknatronik]

Originally Posted by ozoftheelements

I'm getting so tired of mp3's. I don't mind rendering an mp3 version for a client but I've noticed over the last few years that people actually DON'T KNOW WHAT A WAVE FILE IS! I have been getting actual complaints from people about wave files. Even so called "producers" *cough* and "engineers" *double a-hem* have been acting dumb. Just a few examples I have started seeing.

-"producers" bringing tracks to a mix session as multiple MP3's ! for the track out !!!

-clients for our mastering engineer saying we sent the "wrong" thing (a wave through yousendit)

-an actual producer with placements and a reputation saying I sent the "wrong" file of a mix.

-artists dropping off mp3's to be mastered.

-endless people saying they cannot play a wave.

-dj's for my mix tape clients sending back their dj mix MP3 . For final mastering. The last DJ told me , oh my software can't make a wave. I was like BS check again (he was using traktor)



I try to educate, I try to work with people but I am literally about to just BOUNCE FRIGGIN MP3's for peoples finals LOL which is soooo unprofessional !

Every computer i own, mac and PC can play and burn waves. duh. I don't have an I pad but my stupid Blackberry can play waves. duh of course. I'm pretty dam willing to bet that I pads and iPhones can play wave files.

note: I am talking about 16 bit, 44.1 kHz waves. PCM waves.


WHAT IS GOING ON IN THE WORLD ?

idk, maybe some try to play on mp3 players that don't play wavs... .wav is the only format i want... if im mixnf 24 bit fine... if im djing 16 it is fine.

[ozoftheelements]

i don't know. I get the feeling people are not even trying to play or burn it. A couple I just said, na man it'll work just download and double click on it. They called back 15 min later like "hey man this is great , sounds great etc etc !! "

One of my favorite recent episodes was when a client of mine came in to do a feature for some guy from out of town. they sent the song mp3 with an open verse. I lined it up at exactly 0 and recorded his vocals. I consolidated his 3 tracks starting at zero and exported them. Dude's told my client "he sent us something we can't work with bro. Tell him to send us the song with you on it. So I sent them the wave of our reference mix. They wrote back saying "we need it mp3"

double smh

[RRCHON]

Stupid people have money. Don't be afraid to take it from them.

You are doing the world a favor; the more of their money you take from stupid people for things that do not really matter, the less of it they will have to spend on things that do matter.

Darwinism in action.

Send them 16-bit 44.1kHz FLAC (free lossless audio codec) files instead of WAVs. Maybe they are tripping because of portable media player "conveniences" and lack of expected metadata and tagging abilities. Send them a FLAC and you can both be happy. Just don't send them a 24-bit FLAC yet, because possibly many portable media players don't support 24-bit audio yet. But, plenty of portable media players support FLAC now off the shelf or with a firmware update. And the major software players can do FLAC also. FLACs can also contain JPEG or PNG album artwork, just like MP3s. Even many CD burning softwares can accept FLACs as input without conversion. Also, some home media hardware media jukebox players can do FLAC also. Etcetera, etcetera. SoundCloud and BandCamp can do FLAC also as well as other modern sites.

[ozoftheelements]

I'll look into it Nice to learn something new always. Is it compressed (data) ?

[jdsowa]

I'm not sure about this FLAC idea.

iTunes can't even play FLAC files without downloading a special 3rd party plugin. iTunes can play .wavs.

[ozoftheelements]

Originally Posted by RRCHON

Stupid people have money. Don't be afraid to take it from them.

You are doing the world a favor; the more of their money you take from stupid people for things that do not really matter, the less of it they will have to spend on things that do matter.

Darwinism in action.

so funny

Originally Posted by jdsowa

I'm not sure about this FLAC idea.

iTunes can't even play FLAC files without downloading a special 3rd party plugin. iTunes can play .wavs.

i honestly believe EVERYTHING plays waves. my sony mp3 player played waves. my nokia nueror played wavs. i don't know whats wrong with ppl. they freak out when you ask them to follow a link. they want it attached.

[Joe Haze]

Hey this thread has a direct correlation with >>>this thread.

[doom64]

I love it when you ask the client to call/email their other studio that you need a wav or aiff file. Then you get a .wav file that was converted from the mp3 file! smfh!!!

[mdoelger]

Originally Posted by ozoftheelements

i don't know. I get the feeling people are not even trying to play or burn it. A couple I just said, na man it'll work just download and double click on it. They called back 15 min later like "hey man this is great , sounds great etc etc !! "

One of my favorite recent episodes was when a client of mine came in to do a feature for some guy from out of town. they sent the song mp3 with an open verse. I lined it up at exactly 0 and recorded his vocals. I consolidated his 3 tracks starting at zero and exported them. Dude's told my client "he sent us something we can't work with bro. Tell him to send us the song with you on it. So I sent them the wave of our reference mix. They wrote back saying "we need it mp3"

double smh

Simple: When you send your finished tracks over, upload the wav and upload the mp3.

I guess you send via email. Headline the MP3 as "Your MP3: ..." and the wav as "High Quality: ...".

They will likely try to find out why the wav is High Quality.

[mr lee]

There are some older CDJs (Pioneer) that will not play .WAVs. However, that is for live performance, not mastering/bouncing/etc.

I agree with sending both wav and mp3 zipped.

[dynamike]

I get this all the time. So frustrating.
When I send a wave and a client asks me for an mp3, I send them instructions in how to convert it in iTunes or Windows Media. I tell them mp3 is inferior and I don't send them around as the 'final'. If they ask for an mp3 ahead of time, then I send both. Thanks to the poster above, I'm now going to start marking the wave 'high quality version'.

The #1 reason I've heard from my clients as to why they want mp3's..... so it's easier to email the song around to friends, managers, promoters, etc. That makes sense. It's annoying to upload a 20-40mb file every time you want to send it.

I often send them a Dropbox download link and tell them the link will stay active for 2 weeks if they want to keep sending it around.

[dubmunkey]

Originally Posted by ozoftheelements

I'm getting so tired of mp3's. I don't mind rendering an mp3 version for a client but I've noticed over the last few years that people actually DON'T KNOW WHAT A WAVE FILE IS! I have been getting actual complaints from people about wave files. Even so called "producers" *cough* and "engineers" *double a-hem* have been acting dumb. Just a few examples I have started seeing.

-"producers" bringing tracks to a mix session as multiple MP3's ! for the track out !!!

-clients for our mastering engineer saying we sent the "wrong" thing (a wave through yousendit)

-an actual producer with placements and a reputation saying I sent the "wrong" file of a mix.

-artists dropping off mp3's to be mastered.

-endless people saying they cannot play a wave.

-dj's for my mix tape clients sending back their dj mix MP3 . For final mastering. The last DJ told me , oh my software can't make a wave. I was like BS check again (he was using traktor)



I try to educate, I try to work with people but I am literally about to just BOUNCE FRIGGIN MP3's for peoples finals LOL which is soooo unprofessional !

Every computer i own, mac and PC can play and burn waves. duh. I don't have an I pad but my stupid Blackberry can play waves. duh of course. I'm pretty dam willing to bet that I pads and iPhones can play wave files.

note: I am talking about 16 bit, 44.1 kHz waves. PCM waves.


WHAT IS GOING ON IN THE WORLD ?

Not a useful answer but if an 'engineer' or 'producer' asked me for an mp3 instead of wav they'd get neither and no more contact

Sounds like your swimming in the wrong waters.. either elavate your clientele through education or dump em as time wasters

[psycho_monkey]

Originally Posted by AyA

In case you don't understand.

Yoututbe's 1080p content is derived, can be often, from 48kHz source where a CD is a 44.1kHz master... Music videos are still not an easily traded commodity... Try buying a single let alone finding an obscure clip.

Again with the industry immolation projection from my corner...

Lol...I guarantee YouTube is always playing a compressed audio stream, which is less than cd quality....even on the high res stuff. Blu-ray is encoded audio as well, even though it start off 16/48 in most cases.

[MrWiggly]

Originally Posted by AyA

FM radio sounds better than any mp3 you can buy on Itunes...

a lot of the time, FM radio is playing the mp3 files you can buy on iTunes as its source material.

{Semi-sarcastic rant}

Yeah, I realise that obvious proprietary iTunes can't play free lossless audio codec FLAC yet. And THAT is not a problem. Obvious proprietary iTunes can continue to be obvious proprietary iTunes as long as they want. Nobody is stopping them and some of their proprietary gear/services/software is actually entertaining.

But the rest of the world and the rest of the internet and the rest of much of the software industry and userbase works with free software and free codecs such as FREE LOSSLESS AUDIO CODEC (flac) all the time.

It's a good codec and it works and many sites all over the place and plenty of both software and hardware supports it now. So yeah, not trying to be too much of a smart-ass, but a good free lossless audio codec is a good free lossless audio codec and is not proprietary and it emails just fine also on modern email systems. File sharing sites are always an available opportunity too. And people should be glad to get the good quality version and not the book-with-90%-of-the-pages-torn-out (lossy) version.

If they really need low tech emailed, send them notation sheet music and a general MIDI file

FLAC might not be the exact future, but it's here now and it's close enough and good enough. WebM HTML5 container file type of stuff may come later, (if the GoogleYouTubeLeviathan pushes hard enough). But, that's kind of like the already more versatile Matroska and the prototype WebM (OGG-Matroskalike-video-whatnot). And low and behold, that's closely related in origin to the FLAC/OGG-Vorbis tribe (and OGG's can contain FLAC's and Matroska's can contain pretty much anything).

FLAC's can do multichannel (more tracks than stereo) and high sample rate audio too.

MP3's are quick and dirty, but if you really need quick and dirty and iPod capability, then do an M4A (iTunes AAC or ALAC). But of course, ALAC isn't compatible with most of the rest of the world you say... yeah, but FLAC is!!!!

And if modern computer users don't know how to install 3rd party software (or ask a friend to do it), then they are in dangerous waters running a computer and/or being on these internetz all by their lonesome.

Or all they gotta do is just download VLC (or whatever else is clever with built-in codecs) and go. If they don't know how to download a freeware media player, let alone an codec, how in the heck did they manage to check their own email?

I smell a cell phone or some other lame ass mass market hyped device in the midst...
I suppose FLAC ringtones aren't mainstream enough yet, is that it?

OK, I'm kinda playing around with this. I apologize for being a smart-arse. But behind the snarfiness* is an honest non-hostile reply.

I bought plenty of MP3's also, but when I compare them to the WAV/FLAC lossless stuff I feel kinda lame for buying into that. Even though the AAC's and OGG's sound better to my ears, when I compare them to the lossless copies of the exact same tunes, I hear wider and deeper and bassier and clearer music in the lossless stuff. Sometimes we don't know what we're missing until somebody shows us the light, or in this instance, plays us the sound.

{/Semi-sarcastic rant}

Going back to the book analogy/metaphor, I think it's important for people to have access to a real thing when they think they are getting a real thing and paid for it and when it's safe enough to be real. In the future, when lossy encoding is perhaps obsolete for our main purposes, folks may consider lossy encoding to be analogous to sensorial aesthetic censorship. Maybe people's hearing will have evolved to be even more superior than is already possibly just fine right now. And, perhaps they will hear all the lossy digital artifacts as clearly as 1930's era audio grime sounds like today.

OK, i'm kinda speaking playfully, but not 100% joking. It could happen.

[C//AZM]

That's a great rant Restpause!

I've had many clients ask me to send them an mp3 via email so they can practice the vocs while in the car or something. I have no problem with that, but the first time someone asked me to send MP3s to the mastering lab?? I had to have a loong talk with the client.
lol No way am I sending the mp3s to be mastered. but then again I've heard several work mixes on the radio that had been mastered(?) and pressed from what I'd mailed them.

[dynamike]

Originally Posted by C//AZM

That's a great rant Restpause!

I've had many clients ask me to send them an mp3 via email so they can practice the vocs while in the car or something. I have no problem with that, but the first time someone asked me to send MP3s to the mastering lab?? I had to have a loong talk with the client.
lol No way am I sending the mp3s to be mastered. but then again I've heard several work mixes on the radio that had been mastered(?) and pressed from what I'd mailed them.

If the client asks for mp3's for the purpose of redirecting them to mastering, I just send the wave. If they don't understand the quality issue, even after a talk, then they wont be smart enough to bother questioning why I sent a wave either.

[ozoftheelements]

Originally Posted by dynamike

If the client asks for mp3's for the purpose of redirecting them to mastering, I just send the wave. If they don't understand the quality issue, even after a talk, then they wont be smart enough to bother questioning why I sent a wave either.

yeah you would think. But it gets straight up frustrating when your getting treated like you are the one in the wrong!

[doom64]

Originally Posted by ozoftheelements

yeah you would think. But it gets straight up frustrating when your getting treated like you are the one in the wrong!

I can never comprehend how somehow can call themselves a mastering engineer but not know that an mp3 file is unsuitable for mastering.

Using an mp3 file for mixing and/or mastering is the equivalent of using bicycle tires on a pickup truck.

Meanwhile celt/oaic (Opus Interactive Audio Codec) is being promoted as superior in efficiency against speex, mp3, ogg, and aac. a foobar2000 encode/decode/convert/play capability already exists. and even without foobar2000, the decoder can play the audio. very easy to install. it's low-latency (yet lossy) and is designed for modern interactive sound. So the game keeps changing...


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...tainer_formats
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_audio_codecs


foobar2000: Change Log
Opus Codec
Xiph.org
Jean-Marc Valin's random rants on DSP, Speex, open-source - Opus will be mandatory to implement for WebRTC
WebM - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Matroska - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
HTML5 video - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
HTML5 Audio - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
HTML5 in mobile devices - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Theora - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Theora.org :: main - Theora, video for everyone
Xiph.org

Ah... I guess I'm getting lost in links, oh well...

[Ampex 354]

I have my own moan on this....a few months ago a friend of mine made a CD, and it was a mess. Some old musician buddy of his first took him and the band the buddy picked out into one studio where the equipment didn't work, then a week later got them into another buddy's makeshift 'studio' in the back of a house.

I'll spare you the gory details of nonexistent monitoring, distorted bits and all....a totally digital recording, this. They got a batch of CDs with things like 15 seconds of dead air before the first song started on the first track, and everything panned to the centre with some very strange digital faux reverb on some of the songs. A mess.

My friend thought it sounded strange and 'dead' (which meant no reverb) on some songs. It all sounded so bad, even after they tried to remix it once (and it all still ended up mono)....my friend had them give him a set of backing track mixes, the idea being he'd have me engineer new lead vocals, mix them onto the tracks, and have a much better finished product.

Like the other recordings, these tracks were very strangely EQ'd, occasionally very brickwalled (although with the peak level brought down to -6 dBFS), and had throughout what I call a sonic 'shape-shifting' effect. All of the tracks needed lots of complex EQ to make them sound passable, and occasionally an EQ curve that would work for most of one song would suddenly sound almost hollow when the instrumentation changed for one verse of it....you get the idea.

And....everything cut off very sharply at 16 kHz. Elsewhere here I've learnt this is the giveaway that even though this CD was PCM audio it had been made so from 192 kbps mp3s.

And to top it off, these tracks were still mono or very defective stereo which could only be sorted by combining to mono after all the problems were minimised.

My friend said people around here wouldn't know mono from stereo, so he wasn't bothered by it. (He said he didn't like those country records where you hear a guitar on one side and piano or drums on the other....)

My friend did admit my work made the tracks sound much better than they did....night and day difference. We did the vocal overdubs in two quick sessions a week apart....I took the tapes (all I have left for multitrack now is a heavily modded Tascam 4 track machine) home to do final mixing....added necessary compression/limiting to the vocals to get them to fit with the way the tracks were....and his old buddy talked him into going back to that 'studio' to re-record his vocals again there (they had some hot new Chinese thing, I had a Neumann U47fet) and to remix it all from scratch, and even master it there....and I'll bet you it's all mp3s made into CD tracks, equally wretched. Pity they can't see or hear where it's all going wrong.

I'm in north central Arkansas, not of or from north central Arkansas....these other lot are....so moan it be.

[kennybro]

New World Order. Most people, even people in various production fields, have absolutely no idea that MP3's are compressed, and then display no interest in understanding of what data compression even is when you try to explain.

The average listener doesn't seem to care about the subtle audio quality differences, and thinks you're just being an anal, ranting geek.

Moving things very quickly over the internet and storing 10,000 songs on a tiny chip is the order of the day, not the best sound quality possible. The mass public, and even many artists, just don't care anymore.