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FL Studio Exporting Quality


zikon
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I have a question refering to the file quality of exported files from FL Studio. I know (or atleast i think I know) that when most professional CD's are made, the tracks are made to wav files, which i thought to be known as like a raw music file with no compression, there fore you get all the quality, thats why a wave file of a song off of a cd is around 60 to 70mb. But my question is.. Is it best to export songs i make from fl studio into wav files for the purpose of going on the final cd. because i have noticed some projects here, the tracks were turned into wav files. does it make a difference.

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Ok, I about half understood that, so I'm going to go off of what I understood.

Most CD burning programs take the mp3 and automatically convert it to wav, so it seems logical that if you take a wav file and put it in, it won't convert it right?

Wrong. It takes the wav file, reconverts it to a wav file into a sound so horrible it makes a cat in a blender sound like a Beethoven Symphony.

Some programs, however, let you burn the wav directly to a CD, so I would recommend finding one that does this. If not, Compress it to an mp3 with a ridiculously high bit rate and there will be next to no loss in quality.

Does that help?

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OK. If you are asking questions about this sort of stuff, you got to ask the right questions. Which you aren't. So I'll just throw knowledge at you and hope something sticks.

Firstly, you may want to read this. Its just the wikipedia article on the wav format. To quote it:

Though a WAV file can hold compressed audio, the most common WAV format contains uncompressed audio in the pulse-code modulation (PCM) format. PCM audio is the standard audio file format for CDs at 44,100 samples per second.

and further on down:

Audio CDs do not use WAV as their sound format, instead using Red Book audio. The commonality is that both audio CDs and WAV files have the audio data encoded in PCM. WAV is a data file format for computer use. If one were to transfer an audio CD bit stream to WAV files and record them onto a CD-R as a data disc (in ISO format), the CD could not be played in a player that was only designed to play audio CDs.

So, assuming your WAV file contains 44.1KHz PCM audio, the CD encoding program shouldn't re-encode. Unless its made by some dodgy hack of a programmer or something. But you can't burn WAVs straight onto a CD. What the program will do is take the PCM data out of the WAV container, and wrap it in the Redbook Audio container.

Now FL Studio can output in a great many different formats. But to keep it simple, if you are burning to CD, make sure you are exporting a WAV with 44.1KHz and a bitdepth of 16 bits. That way you don't have to do ANY re-encoding.

Does that make sense?

And Chavous: I have no idea what program you are using to burn CDs, but please stop using it. Unless you borked up your WAV file, your program should be able to import WAVs properly.

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And Chavous: I have no idea what program you are using to burn CDs, but please stop using it. Unless you borked up your WAV file, your program should be able to import WAVs properly.

Haha, point taken. I used Nero a while ago to burn WAVs to a CD, and it screwed it up royally. Since then I got NTI CD/DVD Burner, but I haven't tried to burn WAVs because of what happened the last time.

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Now FL Studio can output in a great many different formats. But to keep it simple, if you are burning to CD, make sure you are exporting a WAV with 44.1KHz and a bitdepth of 16 bits. That way you don't have to do ANY re-encoding.

I looked again at the exporting of wav's in fl studio, and it doesnt have anything about the KHz, so i am asuming that fl studio automatically exports its wav's as 44.1KHz?

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ICIC, so Fruity exports to whatever setting you have in audio options then. Makes sense. But keep in mind this:

Sample Rate - Lets you set the sample rate that will be used by the mixer. Have in mind that most generators and effects are optimized to run in the default sample rate of 44100Hz and you might experience problems while running in other sample rate, or some effects or generators might sounds differently. It is recommended that you use 44100Hz unless it is really necessary to change it.
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Increasing the sample rate in FL Studio should never have adverse effects on the sound quality, besides making it sound better.

However! If you increase the sample rate beyond 44.1 KHz and intend to play the song file back live (ie: pushing the play button in FL), you'll likely be disappointed. Cranking up the sample rate in FL will cause exponential increases in CPU usage, especially beyond 44.8 KHz. Anything higher than that... can't suggest. On the other hand, if you're just upping the sample rate to render the song to an audio file, it shouldn't cause any problems. Might take considerably longer to render, but I can't say I've ever tried.

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I don't know about FL, but in REAL sequencing software like Sonar or Cubase, the samplerate is based on your ASIO settings. I can run at 96khz with little CPU usage (since it's all in my audio interface).

The point is that a CD will not accept anything that isn't 44khz 16bit. Burning a higher resolution wav to a CD will cause it to get warped and sound like shit pie.

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