Export MP3 settings

Hi guys,
It’s the last mile. I only need to put my first episode on spreaker and after 1 month and a half of getting mad I succed.
However, I have the audacity project with my voice and the background music , the music is in stereo mode. I exported with the default options that are Bit rate mode: Preset, Quality: Standard, Channel: Joint-Stereo.
But, I remember that for podcast it’s better Mono, I tried with the option Force export to mono but the background music is very low, and maybe the overall sound is lower than stereo.
My voice has -18 LUFS and the music -35 LUFS. Any tips? Or is it ok publish in Stereo?

If you convert a stereo music track to mono and the volume drops down, they it’s a good bet there’s something wrong with the original stereo track.

Select the stereo music track and use the drop-down menus on the left > Split Stereo Track. (not to Mono).

Select one of the two > Effect > Invert. Menu on the left > Make stereo track.

Now try the mono mix and export. That better?

Koz

Yes it works. But why? I used song from audionautix is one of the most used site to get royalty free music, I thought the songs were good. Can people her this bad thing in the song?

It worked with the song in my intro episode. In the episode 1 I have another song, taken again by audionautix, I have the same problem and seems that your trick does not work this time. Any tips?

You’ll probably have to leave it stereo or find some different music, Most professional recordings are made to be mono-compatible but maybe not these… Some effects (such as “stereo widening”) can create mono-compatibility problems. This is usually from an effect… It usually doesn’t happen “accidently”, but the music producer may not care about mono compatibility, or if they are amateurs they may not know what’s happening in mono.

Leaving it stereo would mean that your listeners wouldn’t hear the music correctly if they are listening on their mono phone-speaker (or anything mono),

It’s possible for some of the content to be in-phase and some out-of-phase and in that case, mono will never work properly. For example, you could have in-phase vocals and out-of-phase instruments, and then in mono the vocals would remain and the instruments would be removed. If you invert you’d get the opposite with the vocals removed and the instruments remaining. Anything that exists only in the left & right channels would remain in both cases.

What he said. If you leave a song like that in stereo, the first time someone listens on a mono device (like a cellphone), they’re going to get that music imbalance or damage.

The most common way to get that distortion is a bad conversion from analog to digital. A very common error is to convert your vinyl albums to digital with an affordable “adapter cable” instead of a full-on digital USB adapter or equivalent. The problem is with the laptop. The “headset” connection on most laptops is not stereo, and depending on how the adapter cable got there, you can get either left or right sound “upside down” instead of matching the mating track. That produces magic sound. It plays perfectly on this computer but not that one.

It’s almost always the case that it plays perfectly at your house, but not when you send valuable work to a client.

The acid test (points given if you know what an acid test is) is to temporarily reduce the track to mono and listen. If it gets distorted or reduces in volume, it’s damaged and may or may not be fixable. If that Invert repair trick fails, use different music.

The music is worth every penny you paid for it.

Koz

Thanks for the replies, as always.
Can I say a thing?
WHAT THE ****. My god, I have the episodes written from September, and every time something bad happens, the copyright music, the images of the cover, my headphone. I feel exhausted. I want only to publish and see what happens, and I hope to be judged on the content more than on these details. It became an obsessive-compulsive process.

However, I tried to compare the Mono track MP3 and the Stereo track in the project. To do this, I opened the project with the original audio, and I imported the MP3. The MP3 sound seems less fresh I don’t know how to explain, there are less acute, I am not an expert,. The audio is only slightly lower. I don’t know how is a distortion, but I think it’s something easy to detect.
In the first song, the one for which I wrote, the difference is huge. This one is not bad for my ears instead, probably could be only the MP3 conversion.
I need this song only as an intro for 15 seconds. On the other side, searching for another one requires another time. Yes, there is good music paying, and I’m ok with this, the problem is that if you read the license, this requires maybe you need to pay a subscription every month also if you downloaded only one song. If you can buy a single one, you can use the song only for a certain amount of time, and then you need to rebuy the license.
Just to know the guilty song is this https://audionautix.com/Music/AcousticBlues.mp3

I tried with the option Force export to mono

Now you know why I’m not a fan of Force MP3 To Mono. It’s super easy to create damaged performances and unless you think to check it before you post, it may go on-line or to the client damaged. Much better to make a mono show on your timelines and produce your finished work and listen to it there.

I can make this worse. You can’t make an MP3 from an MP3 without a dip in sound quality. This may be where your odd music problem came from.

The MP3 sound seems less fresh

MP3 gets its tiny files by scrambling musical tones and leaving some tones out. If you use MP3 music in your show and then post the show as MP3, it does it twice. Sometimes you can hear that double compression. You only get three passes like that before the music turns to trash.

ACX Uses the super high quality MP3 requirement of 192-Constant (minimum) for audiobooks to help get around that. The sound still gets messy, just not as much or as fast.

Koz

Never do production directly in MP3, but if you have MP3 music in your production, you have no choice.

Koz

I’ve never met Spreaker before. Do they have technical standards and practices like ACX? I didn’t see anything. Just based on the production setups and instructions, I would think they’re a lot less strict about meeting Peaks, Loudness, and Background Noise.

I see they have an app that will let you produce a podcast on your phone. I’ve said you could do simple voice work on your phone forever—and I shot a voice test to prove it—but Everybody Knows you need to go out and buy a Yeti.

Also similar to ACX, they dive straight into promotion and publicity and all the touchy-feely stuff that you can probably worry about after you get your microphone working.

Podcast monetization is buried somewhere in the instructions, although I see hiring Spreaker and subscriptions are perfectly straightforward.

Koz

I decided to use Spreaker because it is the platform that everyone suggests starting, and it’s really simple to publish on every other platform. I thought there are not some requirements, I am only worried about my potential audience, but I believe that they can not hear this drop in the quality.
In Spreaker there is the possibility to create a private podcast. In this way I can try to listen to my episode before publishing, but I think it’s only on Spreaker, I mean, you can not for example, have a preview of your file on Spotify. Instead, if this could be possible should be the solution, also because Spotify and other platform apply loudness normalization to the file and other stuff I think.

You told me a lot of times no MP3, I know and I get the lesson, but the music on the Internet is only MP3 unless you pay for it with the problems I already said.
I tried to export the file as an MP3 with Insane quality, and I compared it with one with Preset quality, I don’t know maybe there is a slighty difference, but I don’t know, now I am biased. Another thing to account for is that it is normal that the audio changes a little, passing from Stereo to Mono, the sound passing in your ears is different, you hear different things in different ears.
However, this is the case in which be ignorant and don’t get information as I did it’s the best, if you didn’t know all this stuff the music is pretty much the same and you post it without feeling guilty of something not perfect. Sometimes, as in life, better not know. Ok, too philosophic, sorry.

I updated the three results: Stereo, Mono and Mono with the trick. Maybe it’s better the one without trick. If you want to listen to the track, because I continue to think that it’s something no one can hear, simply listening to the Mono track. Maybe an expert ear is better, and I don’t know how much my headphone are reliable.