Help me out - exporting

[jmreyes]

Hi guys,

Im an absolute newbie to home recording but i have read tons and tons of articles on tracking and mixing so i guess i know the basics.

I have a few questions and i hope you guys can help me out:

I just finished sequencing a drum beat for a whole song in Fruity Loops.
Im gonna record the guitars (rhythm and lead), bass and vocals in Adobe Audition.

1)How should i export the drums sequence in Fruity Loops?
As WAV? 16 bit or 32 bit?
or as MP3? What bitrate?

After exporting the drums, I import the file in auditon, record the guitar and vocals. Mix it as best as i can.

2) Now, how should i export the whole song from Audition to a soundfile that is radio-ready? Mp3 i guess?

I mean what should i consider in order for the song to be loud and good enough for radio airplay?

Thanks for your help in advance.

 

[Theros]

export it as .wav... then import it to audition, you should be able to move it around enough to get it in time, if your exported file is not including non-play at the beginning of the track

As for exporting, depends on what you wanna do with it... an high quality (256kbps) mp3 is good enough for the net, and there is nothing stopping you from exporting 3 million times if you like... I believe if you wanted to make a commercial CD you should look at 44.1 wav at least...

 

[Rusty K]

I'm not familiar with Fruity Loops but my drum generation program exports as wav 16bit. I'm sure it's probably the same with FL. I am upgrading the software so that I can export at 24bit and variable sample rates.

I also us Adobe Audition. It automatically converts any wav file to 32bit float (internally) but then when you export for burning to a CD (I've never burned an mp3 CD directly from AA) as stated in the previous post you'll need to convert back down to 16bit 44,100. I might add that if you are new to this you might keep your files 16/44,100 all the way through the process so you don't have to learn about dither. You would need to "dither" at the end of your processing if your were converting down from higher bit and sample rates.

If you are going to export with the idea of getting radio airplay I'd think CD rather than mp3. Mp3 is a compressed format and is great for downloading from the web (smaller file/less download time) or whatever but not as good a quality as CD. Of course it seems most can't really hear the difference or don't care these days. But for radio definitely go for highest quality.

Get some commercial hit CD's and bring a song/wavfile up in AA so that you can look at the actual wavform in edit view. Go to Analyze/Statistics and it will give you the max db of both channels as well as other helpful information about the waveform. Compare what you see and these statistics with your own mixes then you'll get an idea of where you stand on vol. etc. Of course this has nothing to do with whether or not you have a good mix. That's a "whole nuther ball game".

Rusty K