Trouble in River City

drstawl

drstawl

Banned
I've got a "bro" gig to convert 7 songs from CD to mp3 and create an mp3.com site. I offered to do this mostly to practice with someone else's music/image etc. and I told the guy upfront that was where I was I was coming from. Anyhow, the songs were put on demo size CDs recorded/engineered/mastered by who knows who. They had some nice mics but pretty much screwed up the recordings; I figured what the hell? He's happy with the sound on the CD. With 128Kbps mp3 who's going to notice? So I dumped the tracks via S/PDIF into Gina from the CDs and they sounded the same as on the CD. Then I encoded a few of them. OUCH! The slight "phasing distortion" sound I heard on the original recordings turned into a warble on the mp3 that sounded like they were underwater. My SF encoder has never let me down until now, even at lower rates. Has anyone experienced this before?
 
I haven't had as bad a problem, but I have noticed a digital "sizzle" (for lack of a better word) on one of my songs in particular. As I read on "How Things Work"...

"MP3 format uses characteristics of the human ear to design the compression algorithm. For example:

There are certain sounds that the human ear cannot hear.
There are certain sounds that the human ear hears much better than others.
If there are two sounds playing simultaneously we hear the louder one but cannot hear the softer one.

Using facts like these about the human ear, certain parts of a song can be eliminated without hurting the quality of the song for the listener."

I would understand this to mean that if a tune is originally mixed poorly (or in my song's case fair), those psychoacoustic properties are out of wack thereby creating a poorly sounding MP3.

That's just my guess mind you, I'm far from being an expert.

Hey Doc, while we're on the subject, let me ask you a question...I was thinking of doing the same thing but charging for my services. What do you think would be a fair price for doing that work? Anyone else is welcome to answer my question as well.
 
That sounds like a good theory. I'm going to do some more experiments with another encoder and/or at higher bitrates.
And $20/hr sounds fair to me.... :)
I'm not doing anything fancy, but it does require some equipment/skills and most of all my time. But it's tough (for me at least) to charge anything when it sounds like shit.
 
I know what you mean. But I guess it's like anything else in the digital age, garbage in, garbage out. I suppose what you'll be doing is essentially remastering to MP3.

I'd be interested to know if you have better experiences with a different encoder.

I don't have anyone lined up as a client or anything, and I'm not looking to make a ton of money, I thought $20/hour sounds about right. (In a very hushed wisper)...I'd probably do it for free just to get into the music scene a little more. (Shhh!)

Thanks for your input!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top