Another weird audio file issue.

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Another weird audio file issue.

Postby Malcolm Boyce » Mon Nov 05, 2012 1:12 am

This is a weird one. I'm putting music together for a dance competition and out of hundreds of successful transfers, I had two strange mp3 files that gave me an unusual experience.

The first thing I do with all this stuff is convert all the many file types I get into 44.1/16 wave files. This gives me two things. A successful conversion typically means that the file isn't corrupted and won't cause me any technical glitches doing simple playback, and having all playback be the same predictable file type avoids any hiccup with changing sample rate or other variables in the context of the event. I do this most often using the Batch Converter in Sound Forge, which is able to read and write the many different common files that I'll get.

Now in the case of these two files, they both show up as .mp3 and play in WMP, RealPlayer, Winamp, etc, but Forge can't even open them, let alone convert them. I even tried importing them into Sonar, which is another thing that sometimes has worked with oddball issues, but nope.... No dice. My only successful workaround was to burn an audio CDRW using Windows Media Player, and then rip the audio from that.

Any ideas of what I might have missed, if anything?
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Re: Another weird audio file issue.

Postby sean.boyer » Mon Nov 05, 2012 1:01 pm

Probably somehow ended up with a non-standard bitrate. Some programs have extreme problems with non-standard files.

Two pieces of software I couldn't live without when talking about transcoding are Media Info (tells you EVERYTHING you could ever want to know about any type of media file) and FFMPEG. FFMPEG is a fantastic (and 100% free) commandline application that will transcode ANYTHING to ANYTHING ELSE. It is simple, and incredible. You can do anything at all with it... I do ALL my transcoding etc with it.

I have written a few scripts that allow me to simple drag a folder on top of a short cut, and have it produce either waves or mp3s, all at a pre-determined spec. Really speeds up the process of producing mp3s for mix previews etc.
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Re: Another weird audio file issue.

Postby Alain Benoit » Fri Nov 16, 2012 6:04 am

Nice!

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