Best Audio Format for Rendering Sound Clips?

MadMaverick wrote on 4/24/2018, 1:35 AM

I’ve been sorting through my old collection of sound effects I acquired over the years from various sites. A lot of the sounds came from YouTube videos. Many of them are mp3. I can’t remember exactly what I did, but I believe that with a converter and or with Sony Vegas I converted/encoded them as mp3. I did this before I knew that mp3 was a really compressed and undesirable format. At the time, I did this to save hard drive space, and because I didn’t notice a difference... and they still sound good to me. I’m listening to them using the same kind of Sony headphones that Howard Stern uses.

I’m wondering if mp3 is adequate enough to keep? I suppose converting them to a wav wouldn’t make any difference at this point? I’m in a bit of a pickle because I’d hate to go searching for all those sounds over again (some of which may not even be online anymore) but at the same time, I want the best quality possible.

Maybe it’s only fair that I look up the sources though, as I’ve always felt like I should give credit to the authors of the sounds with my various projects... but I rarely see that done. Also, most sound effects seem to be public domain, and authorship of the different sounds often times seems unclear. There’s also many of them I can’t remember where I attained.

So yeah, just trying to sort myself out after being out of the game a while. Any info or advice would be appreciated.

Comments

ChristoC wrote on 4/24/2018, 1:56 AM

MP3 is a data-compressed format where somewhere up to 90% of the original has already been discarded; converting to some other format won't achieve any quality improvement.

BTW 'acquiring' these sounds the way you admit very likely breaches someone's copyright; just sayin'.

NickHope wrote on 4/24/2018, 2:07 AM

+ChristoC

But it's a good idea to convert them to WAV before actually using them in a project. When you do that, be sure to keep the sample rate the same as it is in your MP3s (probably 44.1kHz or 48kHz).

rraud wrote on 4/24/2018, 8:53 AM

If they are MP3's to start with, converting them to an uncompressed PCM format will not restore the original quality. So you might as well leave them. But as Nick stated, converting them to PCM before using them in a project would maintain the quality better.

For new S/FX files a Perfect Clarity Audio file <.pca> would save some space, but it would not be cross-app compatible. Flac is also an option I guess. In the future, if you continue to archive to MP3, use 320kbps CBR (typically 48k for video) If some are mono, saving them as a single track mono MP3 file, will double the resolution. OTOH, a single track mono PCM file would be half the size of stereo. Of course it would not have any spacial info.. if there was any before.

MadMaverick wrote on 4/24/2018, 7:39 PM

Thanks guys. Here’s my situation: I currently have 105 sound clips divided into 3 folders.

32 of them are either mp4 video, flv video or wav audio. These are the high quality ones.

44 of them are ones I got from YouTube and converted to mp3. They should be fairly easy to fish back of off YouTube.

29 of them are mp3 that I don’t know the online source of. These will probably be tricky to track down, if not impossible for some.

Do you think my ultimate goal here should be to convert them all to wav with the same sample rates? Many of them I’ll end up with will initially be mp4 video (which I believe is an already good quality format?)

There’s also some that have a compilation of sound effects, and I’d like to break them up into individual clips.

I’m a bit concerned though, because I’m under the impression that ANY conversion or render will degrade the quality somewhat. So perhaps it’d be best if I just left the mp4 and flv clips alone as videos and simply isolated the audio when I needed to use them?

Maybe I’m being overly-thorough lol.

NickHope wrote on 4/25/2018, 5:44 AM

I wouldn't convert them until you use them unless you want to get rid of an actual video stream within some of them.

If you really want to chop up the ones with multiple sound effects within them then render to WAV. You're not really losing quality by doing that. As I understand it, WAV is basically an uncompressed audio file. By converting to WAV you'll basically be doing what Vegas would do internally anyway when you use a compressed audio file.

Are these unique sound effects? You might be able to find their equivalents for free online and at high quality without going to the bother of converting yours. For example you can find the Adobe Audition collection here, which I think can be used commercially, and not just in Adobe Audition. And the other day the BBC released 16,016 sound effects, but for non-commercial use only. There are several other sources of free sound effects on the net.