• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Best Encoding Format

J

JDThuner001

Guest
I have been doing a great deal of research online and am about to settle on WMA over MP3 as "my" standard for saving most audio files. Of course, you always have some files that need to be saved as .wav I know.

My Question is which is the best format for saving audio files such as commercial, weather, voice over, etc., and why?
 
Do the .WAV

JDThuner001 said:
My Question is which is the best format for saving audio files such as commercial, weather, voice over, etc., and why?
Click to expand...

Save it as .wav - 16-bit, 44.1K or better. There are two reasons for saving in .wav format:

1) It's not compressed, which means that you're getting as clean a digital version as possible. Any type of compression - MP3, MP2, WMA - will reduce the quality of the original audio and add noise.

2) Hard drive space is cheap. Add another drive, expand a dynamic volume onto an additional disc, or whatever, but keep your masters uncompressed.

You can always convert a .wav file into WMA or MP3 so you can upload it onto a player. You CAN'T convert an MP3 or WMA file into a .wav and get the same audio you would have if the original sample was a .wav in the first place.

One more thing... For my money, I don't see the need to go beyond 16-bit quantization. That gives you 65,535 different levels of volume for your samples, which is well beyond what the human ear can discern. 44,100 samples/sec. means that you can sample frequencies as high as 22,050 Hz., which is well beyond human hearing and the reproduction capability of most audio equipment.
 
JDThuner001 said:
I have been doing a great deal of research online and am about to settle on WMA over MP3 as "my" standard for saving most audio files. Of course, you always have some files that need to be saved as .wav I know.

My Question is which is the best format for saving audio files such as commercial, weather, voice over, etc., and why?
Click to expand...

The best format for your source audio files is linear uncompressed - WAV. Or some form of lossless compression if your playout software supports it.

You should definitely stay away from compressed audio! Audio coded once does not sound bad, and in fact can be indistinguishable from the source if the bitrate is high - when you listen in the studio. However, it often sounds worse when played on the air. The FM processors changes the spectral balance of the audio which can disrupt the masking and reveal coding artifacts. It also introduces various phase shifts and distortion, which does not help either. It's often quite noticeable on the air when you play MP3 vs CD. It depends on the bitrate of the MP3 (or other format) but it's always best to avoid lossy compression for your source audio.

I like to say compressed audio has fragile quality. It sounds good on it's own, but if you apply any processing to it, it will potentially rear it's ugly head.

There's one more reason - if you're doing web streaming or moving to the HD, there will be lossy coding at the end of the transmission chain, usually with the pretty low bitrate. Having your audio coded once (as MP3) and then again by the transmission codec can also introduce artifacts. Some codecs (such as AAC) tolerate cascading better than the other (MP3, ie) but you have to realize you're removing a lot of audio information when you compress your audio as MP3 (depending on your bitrate) and then you throw away another 97% (masked to some extent) for 48 kbps which is typical for HD and web streaming.

Hard disks are cheap today. You can get two mirrored 500 GB hard drives for about $350... Is that worth compromising your audio quality?


Regards,
Goran Tomas
 
JDT, Listen to the two previous posts. .WAV is the ONLY way these days to save your music files.
We ran an AudioVault system for several years with mp3 at 32kb sample rate and 3.2:1 compression. In our analog transmission chain they sounded great. THEN we converted consoles, STL, processing and exciter to digital and suddenly the mp3's sounded like cr_p! The artifacts that were previously masked were now made obvious by the sample rate conversions and varying compression schemes.

I vowed "never again" and in our most recent upgrade we went with couple of terrabytes of storage in a raid array and re-ripped the entire library for 4 radio stations. The new drives are half the price of our old 64 gig drives and mtbf is astronomical compared to old drives. Take the time to do it right and go with .WAV files now. With HD likely headed your way and possibly webcasting your audio needs to start off as clean as possible.
 
Add me to the list of those advising the .WAV format is the way to go. We started out using 320K mp3's, and although the files worked quite well for a terrestrial broadcast, after some research into HD broadcasting, it was clear to me that mp3's should be avoided. I have already reripped almost half of our library to .WAV files, and I can actually detect an inprovement to the on air sound. I wish we had gone this route from the start.

R
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom