Anyone with experience delivering files to clients so they can upload to Soundreef? While I fine Soundreef’s technical requirements odd, I believe there’s an explanation for it–that this makes the files absolutely compatible with worldwide platforms.
Question: Soundreef wants a 128kbps MP3 encoding, saved as a .flac file. That’s easy, right? Not exactly…
So, I encode an MP3 as needed, then save as a .flac file. Meta-data in the MP3 is dumped. And, the .flac encoding changes the file’s peaks, so watch those intersample peaks!
So, I can edit the .flac meta-data, but Wavelab can’t save the “changed” file. It can only save a copy under a new filename. Is this a problem, or expected? Also, is the edited file saved as a new file changed in any other way as far as audio content?
Believe it or not, it was required for Sound Reef. And, so, yes, you can save a previously rendered MP3 as a new .flac file, and it plays back. However, there must be a way to verify it doesn’t “change” the MP3 audio.
No you can’t, however you can convert it to a FLAC, though I fail to see the point, as MP3 is lossy, and converting an MP3-encoded file to a lossless format such as FLAC makes no sense – unless of course quality is not a consideration.
I should restate: Wavelab allows me to convert the MP3 file to .FLAC by way of “Save As”, and playback sounds fine.
And yes, it seems quite pointless as I mentioned this to SoundReef support. But it’s their way, I suppose.
The conversion to MP3 in the first place probably does some normalisation in the frequency domain which makes it easier to recognise the file algorithmically - the conversion back to flac or wav retains this property.