Blackmagic Forum

I have been using DaVinci 14 for about a month now and recently I have not been able to import certain music tracks. Resolve will import some and will not import others. All music files are downloaded from the same music site from which I have a subscription. All MP3 files. Certain artist will not import. All other functions seem fine.

You will need to provide more detail or samples.

I have a subscription to Epidemic Sound for music tracks. Unlimited. All of the music I use comes from this source. Resolve was importing all tracks fine until recently. The artists it won't import now have been imported before, and unsure if it is the artist or the tracks themselves or a problem with Resolve. Unsure if it will reject new and different tracks in the future.

Peter Chamberlain wrote:You will need to provide more detail or samples.

My OS is in my original post. Epidemic Sound is the source music site. It almost is singleing out certain artists, but that does not seem logical. All are MP3 files, and Resolve did import the tracks it now is rejecting before.

I have Resolve on another computer which is a HP Elite Book 850 G3 PC running Windows 7, and it seems to import those music tracks fine there.

Not sure why I am having trouble on the Mac. Parallels is installed on the Mac, but resolve is not on the virtual machine, it is run on the Mac side.

greatplainscraftsman wrote:My OS is in my original post. Epidemic Sound is the source music site. It almost is singleing out certain artists, but that does not seem logical. All are MP3 files, and Resolve did import the tracks it now is rejecting before.

I'm skeptical about Resolve being the culprit. I'm more inclined to think that the files are subtly corrupted in some way.

What happens if you import the files to a separate MP3 library program like iTunes? My stock advice is not to use MP3's for post at all, but to instead only use WAV files. Do that, and I bet they will work better, plus the editing and cueing will be more adequate (and you can embed timecode in WAV files, which you cannot in MP3's).

Thank you Mark for the reply. I will give it a try.

Marc Wielage wrote:the editing and cueing will be more adequate (and you can embed timecode in WAV files, which you cannot in MP3's)

This isn't correct. You can embed timecode in MP3 files in the ID3 tag.

Sound Devices Recording MP3 Transcription Files on the 552:
http://www.sounddevices.com/tech-notes/ ... on-the-552

BWF-Widget provides a batch MP3 Encoder with Time Code and Metadata
http://www.bwfwidget.com/html/bwf-widget-pro.html

greatplainscraftsman wrote:I have a subscription. All MP3 files.

Epidemic Sound also provide downloads in the WAV format.

https://epidemicsound.zendesk.com/hc/en ... ads-be-in-

Reynaud Venter wrote:You can embed timecode in MP3 files in the ID3 tag.

Yes, that's right, but does Resolve now read it? Although I haven't tried Resolve 15 yet, I did try testing some audio importing a little while ago when 14 came out but can't remember if Resolve actually read and used the tags in MP3s. It certainly took no notice of the edit mark metadata in a Zoom H1 WAV file (nor did Audacity for that matter, but Reaper does).

John Morris wrote:It certainly took no notice of the edit mark metadata in a Zoom H1 WAV file (nor did Audacity for that matter, but Reaper does).

Resolve doesn't currently support cues in Wave files.

One of those many feature requests - would prove useful in the Sound Library.

Reynaud Venter wrote:

Marc Wielage wrote:the editing and cueing will be more adequate (and you can embed timecode in WAV files, which you cannot in MP3's)

This isn't correct. You can embed timecode in MP3 files in the ID3 tag.

It's not continuous and won't work for editing purposes because it's sloppy, and because of the nature of MP3 compressing data in packets. There's a good discussion over on JWSound about the nature of MP3 timecoded files:

http://jwsoundgroup.net/index.php?/topi ... edded-mp3/

WAV files are precise enough that you can edit them with timecode even on a sub-frame level, which is how pro audio mixing/editing programs like Pro Tools and Fairlight work.

The other two good reasons not to use MP3 files for post:

1) it's more overhead and stressful for the computer to have to decode these compressed files and play them back simultaneously

2) they sound crappy compared to uncompressed WAV files.

For all these reasons, get the WAV file and then use a utility like Wave Agent to embed the timecode in the file.

Marc Wielage wrote:It's not continuous and won't work for editing purposes because it's sloppy, and because of the nature of MP3 compressing data in packets. There's a good discussion over on JWSound about the nature of MP3 timecoded files:

Quoting Jay Rose in the very first reply from the link:
“It's not very standard, but mp3 files can have an embedded starting timecode. The playback device then uses the start time and sample rate to compute running timecode at playback. This is almost identical to the way broadcast- or poly- wave timecode works. ”

Emphasis mine.

Read the article that Jay Rose linked to in that thread and that I linked to in a previous post in this thread.

“There are two ways to record MP3 files with time code using the 552. The first is with Linear Time Code (continuous, audible time code) recorded directly to a track. Recording an MP3 file with LTC is identical to recording analog audio with cassettes, with LTC time code on the left channel and mono program audio recorded on the right.

The second, pioneered by Sound Devices, is recording time code stamped MP3 files. This second method generates files much like Broadcast Wave files, having a single time code stamp in the file header.”

1) it's more overhead and stressful for the computer to have to decode these compressed files and play them back simultaneously

Any modern CPU, say in the last 20 years, can more than cope with any perceived “overhead” or “stress” of real-time decoding lossy audio formats.

Run the test. Switch between 30 stereo tracks containing mp3 sources and 30 stereo tracks with broadcast wave files. I literally can’t measure any significant performance hit on any machine I test on, Resolve's CPU and GPU use remains almost identical for each file type.

Resolve 15 supports decoding FLAC, again, with no measurable performance reduction as compared with broadcast wave files across numerous tracks, even on a machine from a decade ago.
This is one of the first tests I performed with Resolve 15, and Resolve barely breaks a sweat decoding FLAC sources (and as it turns out mp3) even on fairly large Projects.

2) they sound crappy compared to uncompressed WAV files

And yet mp3 is so often used for temp music where quality is not the primary concern, since it’s, well, temporary.
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