Editing Episodes

[CusBlues]

I have lately taken to editing the Mystery Theatre episodes. If I fall asleep while listening or have to stop in the middle, I don't like to fast forward through a large file to get where I was. I take the large file and edit it into 5 files. I label the files Intro, Act1, Act2, Act3 and Epilog. This way, when I burn them to a CD-R or CD-RW, I have separate tracks and can find my way back to where I was quicker. I use a bare bones mp3 editor called, interstingly enough, mp3 Editor. It is made by a company called Data Becker and works fine. It was about $20 at Circuit City. There are many programs that do this, and lots more, but they are pretty expensive. Does anyone else do anything like this?

[Charlie]

I do, or I have, I should say.

I have another thread going about this also...

I use Sound Forge and Cool Edit for editing audio files. I am in broadcasting so I work with that stuff every day. I make 3 or 4 commercials a day so I have worked with digital audio now for over 10 years. Of course, the 10 years before that it was all tape.

You mentioned a distortion problem in the other threads. If you have that in the original file then it is not really going to go away. You can [b:7442bf466e]normalize[/b:7442bf466e] the audio to say, -2 db to get it down if the distortion is being generated that way. But, if the distortion is already present then it is not going away.

For listening in a car or CD player that does not decode mp3 files, you would convert to PCM .wav files and burn an audio CD (after chopping the program up into segments if you want).

When I made CD's to listen to that way, I chopped it up into segments, batch normalized, then made CD's.

I hope that helps.

Charlie

[CusBlues]

Charlie, You are light years ahead of me on the editing issue. I have never edited a file for quality. Only chopped them up as I discussed earlier. I am an electrical engineer, and I understand when I read about improving audio quality, but I have never invested in the expensive software to do this (i.e. Soundforge). I understand that to a broadcaster, quality is the top priority and you have extensive experience in this area. Now I have a question. You mentioned that you should convert the mp3 to .wav format and then burn to a CD. I use Musicmatch to perform my burns and I have always just loaded the mp3 files (voice, music, etc.) into a playlist and burned the files to a CD-R or CD-RW. Does converting the files to .wav first improve the quality? I understand that mp3 is a compressed format and ripping or recording a file to .wav would provide an uncompressed file, but I was just wondering if taking the compressed file (mp3) and converting it to .wav first was a better way to go? Thanks again.

Jeff

[Charlie]

Jeff,

Well, I do not know if some of the programs are capable of taking a compressed format and automatically uncompressing it to make a regular audio CD. That is entirely possible but that is not how I do it.

If I am making a regular audio CD, I simply open the mp3 (or other format audio file), then re-save it as a .wav file. For example, in Cool Edit, you just go to the "save as"dialogue and under "save as type" you can select any number of audio formats. If you select "PCM" then you have the regular .wav format that you can just burn to an audio CD.

It may be that some software to burn CD's does automatic conversions but I do it the manual way. Cool Edit (for example) makes flawless mp3 files and is a professional program. It doesn't seem to make errors.

Charlie

[CusBlues]

Thanks Charlie. Yes MusicMatch, Easy CD Creator and other popular programs make the conversion for you. MusicMatch even burns WMA files now. The results are very good, but I can't comment on whether they would meet your standards. My guess is, converting from mp3 to wav would have to do some type of interpolation to retrieve the data that was "removed" during compression to mp3. I think that only ripping or recording to wav would produce a file identical to the source. Those are my thoughts. Thanks for the discussion. I kind of veered from my original problem of distortion in the car. It looks like if I want to fix that problem (if possible) I need to buy some real professional software.

[Charlie]

[quote:21557746ae="CusBlues"]some type of interpolation to retrieve the data that was "removed" during compression to mp3. I think that only ripping or recording to wav would produce a file identical to the source.[/quote:21557746ae]

I think that really that is all you get with anything. The quality would never really be improved from what you had to begin with.

Charlie