Sound quality loss after export

[FunkFox]

Whenever I make a song, it sounds perfect and exactly how I want it, but when I export it and play it through an mp3 player, or if I upload it to soundcloud, the quality drops tremendously and it sounds crackly and awful.

The only way I seem to be able to get around this is if I drop the master volume very low (sometimes up to -7 dB) but still the song is not as crisp as it was in MuLab.

I am recording audio in 32 bits, exporting at 32 bits as a .wav file, and I have MuLab 6.0.35 for Mac

Please Help! It's driving me crazy!

[AndreasD]

Don't listen to MP3. It's a lossy format. You are throwing away 90% of your pressious sound bytes.
Save as WAV file.

Soundcloud does compress as well.

[FunkFox]

What do you suggest as a way to upload my song to a website and have it sound as I intended?
I hear that if you download the .wav from the website it will still sound fine but I want the song to play clearly without needing a download.

[pljones]

I've heard lots of complaints about SoundCloud's compression over the years but I don't use it any more so can't comment. However, like Andreas said, never upload to SoundCloud anything other than a lossless format (e.g. WAV or FLAC). If you do, they'll re-encode it, which is very, very bad for quality.

For personal local use, I generally use FLAC - players should be expected to understand this format.

For online use, I use LAME to encode. I wrote a short batch file I can "Send To" (or drop on) WAV files:

Code: Select all

@echo off
set lame="D:\Program Files\LAME\lame.exe"
for %%f in (%*) do %lame% -V3 -q0 "%%~sf" "%%~dpnf.mp3"
pause

It gives a reasonably quality of compression: you can adjust it if you need better quality. The highest setting, VBR320, is pretty close in perceived quality to uncompressed, I'm told.

[FunkFox]

How do I apply that code?

[pljones]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batch_file