Preview not working properly?

[Tim Z]

I am trying to create a show for my mother-in-law's birthday tomorrow. I have the music (two MP3s) and all the images synced up. When I view the show with the little "toaster" preview or the preview in the timeline, everything syncs up nicely and works properly. However, when I use the Preview in the lower left of the the main window, or when I create a .exe file, the show does not sync up correctly with the music. It is a few seconds later than what the timeline illustrates it should be. What could possibly be causing this? There doesn't seem to be any way for me to sync the slides with the music now as the timeline preview does not play the same as the created .exe file.

Could it be because I have two separate MP3's loaded? Could it be another issue with my particular soundcard? I'm stumped

t

[Tim Z]

I managed to fix the problem, but I'm still not positive what the cause was. It appears to have been something to do with the sample rate of the MP3's I used. I downloaded some free MP3's of music from the 1930's that had been recorded from 78 records, including the crackles and pops (which I wanted). The MP3's were done at 22 khz and may have been fooling PTE with its sync.

I had to burn the MP3's to CD (i.e. 16/44.1 wave files) and then load them into Samplitude and create a new MP3 at 44.1 khz. Once I loaded the new MP3 in everything works as it should.

Does PTE have problems with slower sample rates?

t

[Conflow]

Hi Tim,

I have been using PTE since version 4.10 right up to the latest version ~

I always used FM.Quality Sound @ 22050Hz Sample, MP3 Format with no problems at all with any version of PTE. The reason being to 'save space' and the facts are that one can't tell the difference with 'run of the mill Loudspeakers' anyway.

Platforms used over time were '98 - 2000 and XP.

Having said that, make sure that your 'Bits per Sample' is set to 16 bps and the Bitrate is 96kbps which is default FM.Stereo Radio settings at 22050Hz Sample Rate.

I'm at wits end as to your reasoning, why are you converting the MP3 (Mono '78 Disc Audio Files) back to WAV ?? - there is nothing to be gained here except trouble !

Perhaps I have the wrong end of the 'stick'

Brian.Conflow.

[JRR]

Hi Tim:

I am not aware of PTE having issues with sample rates, but then I always use 44.1 (for no other reason than in mixing sound bites from the web, they mix much better if they are all the same )

I realize that you are much more "up" on sounds etc than I, but I am not sure you have to burn the MP3s to a CD to change the sample rate.

dbPowerAMP will do it for you (free) website here: dbPowerAmp

Hope your Mum-in-law enjoyed the show !!

[alrobin]

Tim,

Are you playing back via the CD player? Or, do you have some transitions that are very tightly spaced from each other?

[Tim Z]

Like I said, I was not really sure what the cause was; so from your responses it appears not to be the sample rate. It may simply be that I have a system with three racks of really high end converters (24 channels) which are all clocked to a master clock (Lucid GenX6). My D/A converters (Benchmark DAC-1) can playback any sample rate, but my master clock does not go lower than 44.1 khz. It may be related to that.

The reason I burned the MP3's to CD was that I was having no success with importing them to Samplitude where I could have changed the sample rate. Everytime I imported them, a section of the end of each song was missing. The only way I could get them into Samplitude was to get them on another storage source at 44.1 khz. Burning to CD was the easiest/quickest option. For this show (mostly pictures from the 20s, 30s & 40s) sound quality was not an issue. I wanted the music to sound "low-fi"; i.e. like it was from that era with all the cracks and pops from 78 RPM records.

All I know for sure is that the preview and .exe files were all totally out of sync to what was displayed in the timeline, until I resampled the songs as one longer MP3. Just chalk it up to another PTE mystery.

Al, I was not playing back via CD player. The show has nothing out of the normal with the transition lengths, etc. Basically just like any other show I have created.

t

[Igor]

Tim, sorry I so late with my answer.

It possible that PTE's built-in mp3 player doesn't support some rare combinations of frequency/bitrate/stereo modes/VBR.

However the most pleasant particularity, that if such rare MP3 file doesn't work, it will not under any PC.

And on the contrary - if works fine, works fine on all PCs.