Audio problems

[jakewoodblues]

Merry Christmas all!

Yesterday, I noticed a problem when adding audio to a dvd. I usually demux the video and audio and add them separately. While I usually convert the audio to ac3 or wav, I wanted to use an mp3 for audio (it was to be background music for a menu). When I added the mp3 to the audio track, it came out extremely garbled. I converted it to an ac3 file & it worked fine.

Mp3 looks like a viable file format for the workshop.

Is it, or can the workshop not handle mp3's?

Thanks

[sjj1805]

Whilst DVD Workshop can and will accept MP3 format audio, some users have reported problems particularly when the lame MP3 encoder has been used. The fix is to open the MP3 in an audio editor such as
Audacity
and then convert the audio into WAV format.

[Devil]

What many people do not realise is that there is no such thing as an mp3 audio file, per se. It is a bastardisation, without any standard, of something entirely different.

mp3 is, as a standard, compressed audio on layer 3 of an mpeg-1 (or -2) file. However, the video has to be removed, just to leave the audio file, without losing the integrity of the audio compression. Of course, in practice, there is never any video. There are probably tens of different software devices to compress decent audio into what is considered as "mp3", each doing it differently and each producing different results, e.g., different quantisation swings and the method of wrapping the compressed audio into a stand-alone file. This probably does not matter a tinker's cuss if you are just playing the mp3 in a player or on a computer. But it does matter when you are trying to reintegrate it into a true mpeg-1 or -2 layer 3. With some types of mp3 file (probably those closest to the original layer 3 standard, possibly with larger wrappers), you can do this very well. With others, it is simply impossible. AFAIK, there is no way of telling in advance whether a file will integrate or not. The safest way is to do, as suggested above, a conversion to WAV and I agree Audacity is an excellent software to do this and, because it is open source, it is excellent value for money!