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In my BIAB songwriting, I use audio recording for vocals to sketch out lead melody-line ideas, and even draft whole songs... and my Song Ideas folder is getting quite large, since the recordings are needlessly large WAV's.

Is there a way in BIAB to record directly to MP3, or other compressed format? I'm not concerned about audio quality, it's just for sketching. (although for me MP3 is fine for most purposes anyway)

Suggestions? I suppose I could convert the Wav files after the fact, with Audacity or whatever, but then am I still going to be able to re-play with them in BIAB, punch-in recording, overdub and all those things I love?

Suggestions?

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Check out BiaB's native use of .WMA windows sound compression for that.

Works a treat and sounds good.


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Thanks Mac, do you mean convert it to .wma after recording? Or is there a way to set it so that it records directly to .wma?

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One thing to watch slightly with mp3s is that the files have a very small time difference over raw waves and you will only probably notice it when listening to the final mix. I've experienced this a few times where I have mixed down a few times on the mp3 and then tried to match it to the original backing.

Regards.
Mike.


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BandMoose,

If your using a DXI synth...

I just clicked WAV icon,
then click in the popup screen "Save in Windows Media format."

It rendered and save a wav file about 33 meg,
then automatically rendered and save a wma file about 3 meg.

Might help ?

Seeker

Last edited by seeker; 08/24/11 10:55 AM.

FrankB

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Yes, when first accepting the recorded file in BB, you have the option of selecting what type of audio file it will do and again I recommend using .wma format over mp3 for this purpose.

However, since you already have a certain amount of files stored as .wav format, I'd recommend using something like Audacity with its added feature installed, to do a batch conversion from .wav to .wma. As long as the files retain the exact same name as the bb songfile (other than the suffix) and they are in the same folder as the songfile, the .wma should load with the bb songfile just as it did before when they were .wav files.


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Mac,

Don't have your background hence had to run thru my posting
before posting. LOL.

Anyway, was surprised to see the wma being converted to a wav when
loaded back into BB.

Seeker


FrankB

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Actually, I think BB converts all audio to RAW format, which is basically the same as WAV but without certain headers, as I understand it anyway.

--Mac

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