Multiplay Frequency Responce

[peza2010]

Hi All.

 

About 6 months back I set my old man up with multiplay to use for backing tracks with his duo, configure with a footswitch to make it easy for an old'en and the world was calm.

 

Last weekend I finally got round to going to see them play and was rather under-whelmed with the clarity from the tracks. Check his eq's, no problem there, everything else through the PA sounded nice (he's got a decent PA system) so I thought I'd delve deeper - I was going to buy him a USB interface, having assumed the internal soundcard was to blame, but thought id check out the tracks themselves first.

 

 

The raw audio tracks sound great through windows media player, and through audacity.

The lack of clarity occurs as soon as they are played out via multiplay.

 

I can back that statement up.... I recorded out of multiplay into audacity using the computers internal loopback, and ran a spectrum analyser on both the original file in audacity, and the file that had entered audacity via multiplay. Side by side there is a noticable and fairly steep drop off from around 9k - exactly what id expect to see for how it sounds - the question is.... why??

 

There seems to be no eq facility in multiplay, is this a codec or file format problem within multiplay? Has anyone noticed a lack of clarity?

 

 

Its a shame it is no longer developed because its a great piece of software - Im hoping to find a fix instead of teaching my old man a new piece of software.

 

 

Thanks, George.

[Cheeseweasel]

Multiplay has a known issue with MP3 playback. Try converting your file to Wav and try - it should work fine. Freac is a good free tool for quickly converting between formats.

[peza2010]

I was aware of the MP3 issue, but I thought that was a simple as some mp3's glitching or not playing which was never an issue for my old man.

 

A quick conversion to WAV (thanks for the software recommendation!) has done the trick.

 

I had a harder time convincing my old man (with the ears of a muso in the business for 20 years) that the frequency difference was actually very noticable! He could here a bit of a difference... I could hear a huge difference.

[Bobbsy]

Multiplay's known MP3 issues aside, with the low cost of data storage these days I don't know why anybody bothers with anything other than Wave for playback. A few months ago I bought a 3 Terabyte USB3 external HDD for about $80 Australian. That's probably about 50 pounds. I took delivery yesterday of a Sandisk 64 Gigabyte SD card for $19 and a 32GB USB3 thumb drive for about $10 a while back. Frankly, the only time I bother with MP3s these days is to send audition copies to directors or such--and even that is less necessary now that I have a 100/40Mbps fibre connection (and more and more others in this city have similar).

 

MP3 is a distribution format only and has no place in production, other preparing files or playback in theatre.

[andy_s]

... A few months ago I bought a 3 Terabyte USB3 external HDD for about $80 Australian. That's probably about 50 pounds. I took delivery yesterday of a Sandisk 64 Gigabyte SD card for $19 and a 32GB USB3 thumb drive for about $10 a while back....

 

Haven't you heard? pound's plunged again - something to do with a hung parliament - so that's probably about £80 now! (off topic and possibly too political for the forum) :P

[peza2010]

Multiplay's known MP3 issues aside, with the low cost of data storage these days I don't know why anybody bothers with anything other than Wave for playback.

 

For me, or rather for my old man...

 

The site he buys his tracks from only let you download in mp3 format. He has got the hang of downloading and adding it to multiplay - now to teach him how to convert it.

 

Laptops are witchcraft as far as he is concerned, so getting this far is an achievement!