KVR Audio

garret · Post by **garret** » Tue Feb 28, 2006 4:15 pm

Greetings folks...

At work, we record a lot of long events with mp3 recorders (we have an edirol r1 and nomad jukebox). To clean up these recording and convert them to Real Audio format for streaming, we need to trim the heads and tails, normalize the files, and sometimes do a little eq.

Does anyone know of a host that supports mp3 files directly, without first converting them to wav data? Some of our events are 8 hours long.. the mp3 files are hundreds of megs, and decoding them to raw raw yields gigabytes of data. Ugh.

It would be super fab to find a host that would let me link to the original mp3 file, do some slip editing, apply eq & gain changes, and export as mp3 or ogg at the end. Then I could run the mp3 or ogg file through real producer or db poweramp to get real media format.

-Garret

Lunch Money · Post by **Lunch Money** » Tue Feb 28, 2006 4:31 pm

Even if it's done "behind the scenes", I imagine that most hosts will convert the MP3. I know Tracktion creates a .wav in its temp directory for MP3s used directly in a song.

I've definitely seen standalone MP3 editors, which will allow you to cut it into appropriate chunks first! Might that be an option to pursue?

Greg

kodama · Post by **kodama** » Tue Feb 28, 2006 4:36 pm

You could get a used copy of Live 5.

Lunch Money · Post by **Lunch Money** » Tue Feb 28, 2006 5:01 pm

Does Live 5 not convert to .wav (transparently) before playback?

Newbie Brad · Post by **Newbie Brad** » Tue Feb 28, 2006 5:21 pm

I wonder if something in the Winamp universe would work?

sinkmusic · Post by **sinkmusic** » Tue Feb 28, 2006 5:26 pm

have you tried cockos REAPER ?
Free until version1, can use mp3 & .ogg.
I don't know if it converts to wav (in a hiddn way) while processing... maybe it could suit your needs...
WOuldn't Kristal do the trick ? Audacity ?

bduffy · Post by **bduffy** » Tue Feb 28, 2006 5:42 pm

You might want to try mp3DirectCut, apparently they figured out how to get in there without decompressing. I didn't think that was possible...

Mind you, Sound Forge is very fast with mp3's, I"m not sure what they're doing there either.

SonicBreeze · Post by **SonicBreeze** » Tue Feb 28, 2006 5:50 pm

I think there are apps available for that need. but they may lack stability and features. But Ableton Live may be overkill for that.

You can look at 'mpTrim' here

http://www.mptrim.com/index.html

It claims that it does directly open mp3 files for faster editing(without decode-recode) and does all( Trimming, Normalising, batch process)you need to edit mp3 files.

mpTrim is also available as Free Version but with 7 minute file length. personal edition($20) and pro($70) can handle 1 GB long mp3 file.

kodama · Post by **kodama** » Tue Feb 28, 2006 7:04 pm

Lunch Money wrote:Does Live 5 not convert to .wav (transparently) before playback?

Nope, it reads mp3s directly.

If you choose to warp the file and you have warp automatically turned on, it will make a very small .als analysis file in the same directory.

Lunch Money · Post by **Lunch Money** » Tue Feb 28, 2006 7:19 pm

I can't help but be skeptical.

Most people are never aware that there's a conversion, but a conversion is still usually present.

garret · Post by **garret** » Tue Feb 28, 2006 7:27 pm

Thanks everyone for the ideas. I've tried out most of the mp3 trimmer utilities... they're okay, but often unstable with large mp3s. Also, many of them decode to a temp file if you want to normalize, and there's no VST support, so you can't do a high pass eq for instance.

Krystal doesn't support mp3 input. DB poweramp, Audacity and sound forge can read mp3s fine, but they convert to wave. mp3directcut is buggy.

I'll check out mp3trim, reaper and live 5.. haven't tried those yet.

Thanks!
-Garret

MattmaN · Post by **MattmaN** » Tue Feb 28, 2006 7:34 pm

Yeah try Cockos Reaper.

garret · Post by **garret** » Tue Feb 28, 2006 9:21 pm

Yes indeed, that seems to be what I've been looking for.

Pretty stable too, for an early release. I did get it to crash by trying Nyquisteq... but it's been fine with some other plugs.

When I open up an mp3, it just writes peak and index data... no wave copy of the audio.

Takes a couple of minutes to generate peaks for a multi-hour mp3 recording, but after that it's smooth sailing.

Cheers,
-Garret

sinkmusic · Post by **sinkmusic** » Tue Feb 28, 2006 10:18 pm

If you haven't tried LIve5 yet, you should !! Even if not for mp3 stuff...
Reaper might be a very good program, when it will have some more features.

Pipelineaudio · Post by **Pipelineaudio** » Wed Mar 01, 2006 4:22 am

sinkmusic wrote:If you haven't tried LIve5 yet, you should !! Even if not for mp3 stuff...
Reaper might be a very good program, when it will have some more features.

Which features would that be? As it really targeted a specific audio app early on, the MIDI is still waiting a bit, but are there others you are concerned about?

simple cheap host with direct mp3 support