newbie mixdown question

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guitarnerd

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I'm just learning to use Cubase LE. When I mix down to either a wav file or aif file, the size is about 40 megs and sounds great. However, when I mix down to mp3 format, the file is only 700 K and the quality is atrocious. I have to use mp3 to upload to my myspace site. Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks.
 
You must have an incorrect setting somewhere...

Mp3's should roughly be 1MB per minute.

Also, i don't think the cubase mp3 conversion is great. Try and get a converter with the free Lame encoder (i use CDex)... its meant to be the best free one.
 
Sounds like you are mixing the file down to a really low bitrate. When you are in the audio mixdown window look in the drop down box called 'attributes'. A massive list should appear with figures that read something along the lines of..

"<X>kBit/s, <XX.XXX>khz; Mono/Stereo"

Basically, when you choose mp3 in the file type box, the attributes option is defaulted to "8kBit/s, 8.000khz, mono". You don't want that, it sucks.

The higher the "kBit/s" figure, the better the quality and the bigger the file. And you probably want 'khz' to be at 44.1. And obviously stereo.

Basically, choose the one at the bottom of the list with the highest numbers. :)

But yeah, it would be better to mix it down to a .wav and use something else that uses the LAME encoder to convert to mp3.
 
thanks

thanks, I tried your suggestion and it made a big difference in the quality. Now I know!
 
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