I have an Pioneer SB3 controller for mixing and scratching. This is because I don’t want to destroy my LPS or stylus. I want to use Audacity to rlp is much appreciated. ecord off my mixer, so I can go to town on the controller…they’re a little more forgiving than using the actual vinyl.
Any help is much appreciated.
essei7point0
You are warned against making typos and composition errors in a forum question. That’s deadly when we’re trying to reconstruct your setup in our imaginations.
So you have an actual vinyl turntable and analog mixer. If the mixer has stereo RCA outputs, you can buy a Behringer UCA-202 to interface that with your computer and capture your tunes in Audacity.
Please note that simple, affordable interface, adapter, or dubbing cables are not recommended. They have a terrible track record and can easily produce damaged or distorted copies.
What is the music format your Pioneer mixer needs? Export the music as WAV for archive and storage and then produce whatever the Pioneer needs. MP3 and Audacity Project format are not recommended. Projects can be unstable and easily broken and you can’t make an MP3 from an MP3 without sound damage or distortion.
Koz
you can’t make an MP3 from an MP3 without sound damage or distortion.
I’m not making that up. MP3 gets its small, efficient sound files by rearranging musical tones and leaving some of them out. You can do that once and nobody will notice. If you do it twice some people will notice some sound distortion. You can’t do it three times.
So you can’t put MP3 music on your Pioneer and then make an MP3 dance mix for posting on-line.
Koz
Koz wrote:
So you can’t put MP3 music on your Pioneer and then make an MP3 dance mix for posting on-line.
You are 100% correct, mp3 → mp3 is a really bad idea, however have you heard most of the rubbish on youtube?
Sixth generation mp3 if you are lucky.
It really ruins an otherwise neat new remix.
Come across it more times than I can count.
You can do that once and nobody will notice. If you do it twice some people will notice some sound distortion. You can’t do it three times.
Or you can just encode it as 128Kb/s (or less) mp3 and ruin it in the very first export. 
have you heard most of the rubbish on youtube?
I have a favorite Youtube bad sound example, but it’s not a compression error.
Or you can just encode it as 128Kb/s (or less) mp3 and ruin it in the very first export
Not sure I agree with you. Everybody with the engineering gene does the same experiment. Compress music with decreasing quality until they can clearly hear the damage and they all come away with the same numbers. (Constant) 64 for Stereo and 32 for mono. It’s like the music falls off a cliff.
128-Constant used to be the Audacity default for reasonable/good quality stereo music export.
How did you get there? I was using a Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft licensed product (I forget which editor), not a license avoidance simulation. I wonder if you can even do that any more since the license copyright expired. If nobody’s watching…
Koz
Even at 128K, music is starting to sound dull and a lot of the “air” above 10-12KHz is being lost.
It bothers me a lot.
For speech only, I guess 64K will be ok, but even then, I can tell the difference.
There is a small talk radio station I sometimes do some work for, and they insist on mp3 as it
takes quicker to download clips and less storage on their computers.
Even then, I supply mp3’s only at 320K, after some “arm twisting” by me.
It’s a good compromise between small, horrible mp3 and huge wav files, without losing too much quality.
As you allude to, not all mp3 encoders are created equally.
My default “reference” converter/encoder is made by Izotope, which I assume uses an official version.
(For it’s price, I should hope so).
However, for the above mentioned radio station, the converter/encoder in Audacity is also more than good enough.
There was a forum poster who was supplying a music review program to a radio station. He was using downloaded music and supplying an MP3 to the station. They broadcast it OK, but couldn’t make the station’s podcast/download.
I think they got around the worst of it by supplying the show as an Audio CD — WAV uncompressed. The station was OK with that and it removed one MP3 layer.
Koz
Unfortunately, posting a CD to them is not an option, need quick turn around times.
Between burning the CD and the postal service, it’s equivalent to a century in broadcast terms.
As to the supplied material not making the cut for their podcast, it may well have to do with the station’s
broadcast compressor and processor.
This would add some compression, makeup gain, add pre-emphasis and a soft limiter, which would help matters.
The podcast more than likely did not follow this chain and was taken directly from the CD.
It was probably more a level related issue rather than a quality one.