Ardour and MP3

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#41

let me jump in here again.

first, as i think i already mentioned, i am not missing mp3 support in ardour, although exporting to mp3 would be sometimes handy. but however, i open up soundconverter and tell him to convert everything i need, so no problem there.

but my question is - how is k3b handling this? as i remember, you can install k3b from a repository and it won’t be able to handle mp3’s, but as soon you install lame too, k3b will find it and list it in ->preferences->programs and will be able to handle mp3’s.

this is how i remember k3b woks, but it might be that i am not right.

also mhwaveedit, if lame is installed, i can compile it with lame support, and it will play mp3’s after it. if there is no lame on my system installed - no mp3 support in mhwave.

could something like this be legally done in ardour too?

cheers,

doc

#42

I agree with megamasha. I run a professional recording studio, and all the time customers come (expecially singers) with an mp3 base and just want me to record their voice over it, mix and master, and I do it, cause it’s my job. But I always have to convert the files before so that ardour can make use of them. It is a waste of time and drive space, and I think the professional way to do things is not the one that leads you to time and drive space waste.

VST have patent issues too, but you can build Ardour to make use of them. Why can’t the same be done with mp3s?

#43

I understand pros and cons importing mp3 files, but I want to import some sounds from “freesound” and I can’t do that because the format is mp3. It is annoying a little.

I agree with @nowhiskey, that maybe you can add import mp3 via external tool, eg “lame”? And add path to lame in Ardour options…?

skygge

#44

@skygge: freesound provides .wav and/or ./flac format for most/many of their files too. the mp3 versions are generally just for previews.

#45

Just a brief technical note: LAME is an encoder, and isn’t used to read MP3 files.

But I take your point. On the other hand, I’m not sure you actually got mine (which must be hard since you write this reply months after I took down the original, lengthy text). If I’m on a crusade on this issue (and I’m not sure I am) its not about licensing and FOSS. Its about audio workflow. Look, the existence of MP3 is traceable to one thing and one thing only: limited network bandwidth (ok, maybe too: relatively limited amounts of persistence storage). I see nothing particularly wrong with the format existing specifically as a workaround to these two issues, but these are issues that are already massively less important than they were when psycho-acoustic compression was first developed. What I really object to is the notion that material which has been processed in this way has some role to play in professional workflows. Everybody wants to point the finger the other way - you want to point at record companies, record companies want to point at studios, studios want to point at clients, clients want to point at their internet service providers and so on. What should have happened at some point is that people just stood up and said “yeah, sure, MP3 as a compact distribution and listening format is fine, but we don’t produce music using this format”. Instead, everybody wimped out because of the convenience - and other software companies ran along like hand maidens to make it possible - and now we have ridiculous scenarios where a radio station, which is likely to compress and otherwise distort the hell out of any music they play no matter what its origin, prepares broadcasts starting with psycho-acoustically compressed stuff.

But hey, I can’t fight this battle alone. The producers and engineers wimped out very early, and I’m sure that MP3 import and export will come to Ardour in the not too distant future.

#46

Ardour, much as I applaud you for trying to ‘educate’ users about lossy codecs, I disagree with the approach of simply turning your back on MP3 for so many years for ideological reasons, especially when the LAME codec exists. Encourage people to pick a better format by all means, but don’t sabotage your own bloody product by refusing to support MP3 for the sake of an ideal. So many people have asked for this now, there’s clearly market demand. You can educate people without having to use the stick.

I am heavily involved with a radio network in the UK. We are open source advocates, running Ubuntu everywhere, however for our audio work we have had to choose Audacity / Reaper on WINE over Ardour for one simple reason:

  • Record companies send us 320 kbps MP3s as standard format for early release demos

So, like our many producers and presenters, when I’m trying to construct mini-mixes and trails, Ardour has successfully written itself off as a suitable tool because it requires going through the process of transcoding to wav, where Audacity / Reaper support it out of the box. (See http://blog.onslow-web.co.uk/2012/06/running-reaper-in-linux-using-wine/#more-40 for what the network engineer has said about this)

My message to you is simple: do continue to educate users by providing information, but please abandon your arrogance and listen to what many of your users are asking about MP3 support. LAME exists, use it.

#47

egarding exchanging MP3/ogg, or even FLAC, as “quick and dirty” exchange format for tracks, one problem would be the scaling: Ardour uses floating-point WAV so there’s no “hard 0db” limit to how loud a track can be, or any sort of real “bit quantisaton danger” level.

So at least you’d have to normalise and bounce each segment of audio before compressing it.

It might be a nice thing to have automated with “Ardour Session Exchange”, as an option (not sure if ASE has been brought up to date with ardour3 or even ardour2).
It would remain “Quick&Dirty” even with HGH FLAC since it would compromise quality because you have to convert to 16bit integer audio.

#48

Freedom is choice.
With the development of Internet connections and hard drive MP3 format will lose its importance, now withdrawing from it is like prohibition.
You can always give a warning when test run using mp3 format: D

#49

I have a a pound of salt In my cupboard but that doesn’t mean I’m going to sit down and make a meal of it. The option to use it is what’s important. By not allowing me to even use an mp3 file will only keep me using other DAW’s. This is why I shall continue to use Abelton.

#50

@Brotherbbad: Ardour does not disallow the use of mp3 files. It just doesn’t support it at present as part of an integrated work flow. You can decode them to wav (or whatever) and use the result. Abelton is a fine program - please continue to enjoy it.

#51

Paul, it is most certainly NOT true that Freesound sounds are typically offered in multiple formats (maybe you’re thinking of Bandcamp?). In doing some small “audio theater” bits for my podcast, I have had to download some sounds from Freesound that were ONLY offered as MP3s. I’m not in love with the idea of using MP3s in my podcast, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do. Every time I found a sound that is MP3 only, I always left a slightly annoyed comment asking why they’re not using a lossless format.

Additionally, we play music on my podcast, and artists will often send me 224k-320k MP3s to use on the show. So at the end of the day, I end up having to use MP3s way more often than I want to. Converting them with a different app is no big deal, but being able to import them directly would save one step.

#52

This is a bit after the fact here (about a year!) but I wanted to put in my 4 cents, adjusted for inflation. I’ve worked as a studio engineer, a professional musician, a computer geek and have recorded, transcribed, converted, listened to, and appreciated more audio music files than I can ever hope to count in my many years in the field. Yes, mp3 is lossy. On the other hand, given the current limitations on email and cloud file storage and, especially in the US, consumer bandwidth, there are a number of compelling reasons to use a popular, compressed, lossy file format - many of these similar to the reasons people should use plain text for emails rather than the generally bloated and non-standard HTML or rich-text formats.

If I play you a song, I am conveying to you a set of musical ideas. If I need to learn a song, I want access to a copy of the song which contains all the musical ideas which the performer or composer put into it. It doesn’t matter if it’s audiophyle quality or not. That’s not important. The mp3 format has become widely popular for good reasons, and most people don’t notice or mind the lessened quality of the format. I, personally, prefer to use ogg instead of mp3 since it’s an open source format, but the fact that compressed and lossy file formats, whatever they are, are the most popular formats for exchange of music is a fact of life, and a very logical one. On the web, the most popular image format is jpeg, which is likewise a lossy format, and few if any browsers can display a tiff (lossless) image, nor would many people have the patience to wait for a web page containing multiple tiff images to load.

What is an error is to pass off an mp3 file as a full-spectrum, high quality audio product, and I, also, deplore the popularlity of mp3 downloads as a popular replacement for CDs. An artist may spend thousands of dollars in a studio recording a product with a 16 - 25K audio spectrum range, and this quality is lost in an mp3. Nor can one expect to produce a quality CD product using mp3s as source material. Bicycles and SUVs both have their uses, but it’s a big mistake to try to put bicycle wheels on your SUV.

The incredible explosion of musical creativity in the US and other countries in the 20th century was largely a result of the development of radio as a communications media for music. For a substantial portion of this time, the radio medium was AM, which necessarily imposes a 5K limit on the audio spectrum. This didn’t stop the musical communication and inspiration spread about by late night clear channel broadcasts of shows such as the Grand Old Opry, nor did it stop the many great writers and pickers who grew up listening to this music on the radio.

So high audio quality has its time and place, but this is not all the time, nor everywhere. If I want to record a CD, I’ll keep my recordings as wav files. If I want to share songs with my friends, many of whom are songwriters, I’ll use mp3 or possibly ogg files. Likewise if I want to make a quality audio recording in a studio I’ll probably be using ProTools rather than Ardour.

It would be very nice if Ardour for Linux could handle mp3 files. I have built it from source, and as I recall it built with mp3 support, but Ubuntu desktop doesn’t provide it with this support as a pre-compiled binary. Ardour for my Apple iMac, on the other hand, does, so if I need to work with mp3 files in Ardour I just switch to the Apple side of my virtual machine setup and use it there.

#53

Ardour 3 can import and export .ogg files, so whatever may have been said in the past, its lack of MP3 support clearly isn’t about audio quality.
The reason why Ardour doesn’t “do” MP3 must therefore be the legal issues around free software, patents and licensing.

#54

Locking the thread as more of the posts are spam than content.

 -- Seablade