KVR Audio

A.M. Gold · Post by **A.M. Gold** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 8:33 am

djanthonyw wrote:
I get so many acapellas in MP3 from some big RECORD LABELS expecting me to use them for their remixes!

Yea, that is weird. I've never emailed a wav file though. I wonder what the UL/DL time would be. More and more people are allowing demos to be sent by email but I worry if I sent wav's around they would get irritated at the file sizes.

Midiworks · Post by **Midiworks** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 11:26 am

A.M. Gold wrote:Is the current LAME encoder not good? I use that in Tracktion 2 with VBR on highest setting. What is something better?

ogg vobis

duncanparsons · Post by **duncanparsons** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 11:40 am

haven't you guys heard of shorten?

jinxtigr · Post by **jinxtigr** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 2:33 pm

The closest thing I can think of is one of mine.

The idea is to be able to monitor through something like that so you can compensate for its losses if they're specific. mp3 doesn't really work in a way you can compensate for- if you try to exaggerate highs or something it'll just kill the track- but the Myspace player does something you can work with.

http://www.myspace.com/airwindowsplugins

What happens is the player 'chops' the audio- halves the sample rate with no conversion. You have to add your own 11K brickwall filter to avoid aliasing, which only makes the sound garbagey and fuzzy- you don't want aliasing.

The (AU) plugin to do what is demoed on that page is for money- it prefilters, gives you a kind of treble boost designed for Myspace, and lets you monitor through the 'chopping' which you have to do to hear what the sound will be like.

But I did an AU freebie for just the 'chopping' with no audio preprocessing.

http://www.airwindows.com/f/SpacedOut.dmg

jinxtigr · Post by **jinxtigr** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 2:41 pm

For mp3 simulation of a sort, why not run a spectral FFT plugin?

I'm thinking of Michael Norris's "Spectral Tracing" plugin. It starts up using just the loudest 16 bins and sounds exactly like the most horrible mp3 imaginable. At 256 bins and 0 threshold you can choose between two horrible mp3 style effects- loudest 256 bins (awful) or bins below 0 threshold (also awful but slightly less so).

Horrible

newyorkbrass · Post by **newyorkbrass** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 3:14 pm

First of all mixdown to mp3 is a fantastic feature i use all the time. we are an internet shop - we accept songs done in vst/whetevr/midi and then brass it up with live brass. Most people dont realize how much time/money they would save doing it that way - so we are here to enlighten them...

After we finish recording we send the tracks back to the customer in wav/aiff format. But the mixdowns we send/receive are (almost) always mp3. it is the standard like it or not

anyway it becomes important to hear those mixdowns before we send them to the client to compensate for sound problems. By now I put together a nice template that works on almost any mix but still when i hear the results in mp3 i am always surprized how close it sounds ...
listen to our samples at
http://www.newyorkbrass.com/download-fr ... ample.html

The fact that people have a problem understanding why this is needed just shows why no-one actually programmed it and why it would be a successful plugin!

I would also like to add that like it or not - my sons, my wife, my firends, my parents, the whole city of new york subway riders and a few other people actually listen to mp3 and other lossy encodings exclusively so it definitely *is* a final format.

newyorkbrass · Post by **newyorkbrass** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 3:16 pm

Latest news:

Aleksay of voxengo just emailed me two pieces of information:

1) This thread should be called "mp3 quality evaluation plugin"
2) There arae licensing issues with mp3 codec. I am not sure what they are - anyone has an idea?

BertKoor · Post by **BertKoor** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 3:29 pm

newyorkbrass wrote:2) There arae licensing issues with mp3 codec. I am not sure what they are - anyone has an idea?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licens ... ent_issues

A.M. Gold · Post by **A.M. Gold** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 7:59 pm

newyorkbrass wrote: I would also like to add that like it or not - my sons, my wife, my firends, my parents, the whole city of new york subway riders and a few other people actually listen to mp3 and other lossy encodings exclusively so it definitely *is* a final format.

It's a final format but it wasn't until music went online and then Steve Jobs made billions off the idea of loading music onto flash chips that it became a standard. No one was complaining that CD's had too much data on them prior to that. I prefer m4a's to mp3's but compressed audio always has issues for me in the high frequency range.

Optomadic · Post by **Optomadic** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 8:09 pm

A final format yes a master format NO. Its like a lythograph of a Picasso (in my case

). Or better yet a magazine print from a master version.

Muzik 4 Machines · Post by **Muzik 4 Machines** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 8:16 pm

flac is the industry standar as far as I know for transfering wav files to remix/master/whatever
ogg is still a niche place, and mp3 is still crap, apple lossless is also really good, but totally unused/overlooked

I do wav usually, with the speed we have today it's not that much of a pain (100Mb wav takes 5 minutes to download/20-25 minutes to upload, not that big of a deal compared to dialup times

mr · Post by mr » Tue Jun 17, 2008 9:08 pm

What is needed is a PLUGIN that simulate the output after an MP3 encoder, with presets for:

Different bandwidths 128, 192, etc.
Maybe different codecs

Maybe it already exist

(I know, Know… This Plugin does it, but it's temperamental)

A.M. Gold · Post by **A.M. Gold** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 9:29 pm

mr wrote:What is needed is a PLUGIN that simulate the output after an MP3 encoder, with presets for:

Different bandwidths 128, 192, etc.
Maybe different codecs

Maybe it already exist

(I know, Know… This Plugin does it, but it's temperamental)

Then they will have competing mp3 emu plug-ins with some being more towards the "vintage" algos of a few years ago and then there will be huge, long argument threads on KVR as to which "vintage" mp3 emu plug-ins really nail the sounds of yesteryear and whether it's even possible to simulate those sounds accurately with current DSP technology.

Midiworks · Post by **Midiworks** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 9:36 pm

newyorkbrass wrote:Latest news:

Aleksay of voxengo just emailed me two pieces of information:

1) This thread should be called "mp3 quality evaluation plugin"
2) There arae licensing issues with mp3 codec. I am not sure what they are - anyone has an idea?

http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/EN/bf/amm/ ... icense.jsp
http://mp3licensing.com/help/index.html#3

Gartanius · Post by **Gartanius** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 10:51 pm

Muzik 4 Machines wrote:flac is the industry standar as far as I know for transfering wav files to remix/master/whatever
ogg is still a niche place, and mp3 is still crap, apple lossless is also really good, but totally unused/overlooked

I do wav usually, with the speed we have today it's not that much of a pain (100Mb wav takes 5 minutes to download/20-25 minutes to upload, not that big of a deal compared to dialup times

The error in this is if you do a survey most people only know of MP3 and only half know WAV and most have no clue what FLAC or OGG is and most know apple tracks everything you do with their stuff on a computer. Anyway, that's why most people prefer MP3, not many people care about sound quality, they simply just want the music. Also if you are overdubbing with layers, and you are pushing an overdub more into the background of a song, who is gonna care if that sound sample or overdub was doner with a WAV FLAC or MP3 file? No one. When you use digital audio for movies and all you usually use WAV or MP3, I found alot of FLAC downloads actually sound crappy compared to alot of the MP3's downloaded. WAV files alot of times have crackling noises in the begining or end of them from most people, then there's the waste of time to trim off the crap.

mp3 direct mastering