Poor imported audio quality in Captivate 4

[ksfowler]

Hi Everyone,

I'm having some serious audio quality issues with Captivate 4.  I'm recording my audio in Audacity and importing it into Captivate.   The audio sounds great in Audacity, Windows Media Player, iTunes, and everything else I've tested it in.  However, once I import it into Captivate and press play, it sounds horrible.  It's thin, tinny, and robotic.  The degradation in quality is considerable.  I've tried recording my audio as both .mp3s and .wavs, but they both sound bad once imported.  I've also downloaded all of the available patches, including the patch specifically designed to address poor audio quality in Captivate 4.  I've tinkered with every audio setting I can find.  No luck.  I have noticed that the shorter/smaller audio files are less garbled, and really short files are sometimes not garbled at all.  I would record directly into Captivate, but the audio sounds even worse when I do that.  Anyone have any idea how I can remedy this situation?  Just for background info, I'm running Captivate 4 on a macbook running XP via parallels.

Thanks

[mvlele]

Hi,

Can you please tell us the settings (sample rate, bitrate, no. of channels, sample type) at which you are generating audio files from Audacity.

Regards,

Mukul

[ksfowler]

Hi Mukul,

These are the settings for the mp3 files:

Bitrate:  128

Channels: 1

Sample Rate:  96000

Sample Type:  32 bit float

Thanks,

Shawn

[mvlele · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Captivate 4 does not support 32bit float sample type. Can you please re-generate your sample audio file at 16bit sample type and import inside Captivate. Check if this resolves your quality issue.

Regards,

Mukul

[ksfowler]

Hi Mukul,

That did the trick.  Thank you so much for your help.  I spent a great deal of time trying to figure that out, and once I changed the settings according to your suggestion, my audio sounds fine.

Thanks

Shawn

[alight9010]

Shawn,  I'm having the same issue that you experienced (Audacity MP3s --> CP4). My issue now that I can't seem to export an MP3 from Audacity that isn't 32-bit float. I can start with 16-bit MP3 or WAV files but, when I export and then view the new mp3 file, it's 32-bit float. (Sorry for the Audacity question in the CP4 forum).  Shawn, could you please contact me directly at alight9010 AT gmail.com.

Thanks!

[ksfowler]

Hi,

I responded here in the forums because I figure other people might need this info as well.

In Audacity, I go to:

Preferences -> Quality -> Default Sample Format and set it to 16 bit.

Then click OK.

When you record new audio tracks, they should automatically be set to 16 bit.

Does that help?

Shawn

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[alight9010]

Thanks Shawn,

That's what I tried but I'm getting the following result.

After exporting the 16-bit recording to MP3, I open it in Audacity where it shows it to be 32-bit sample format. It's as if the preference setting is affecting the default for recordings, but not the default for exporting. Do you think the LAME MP3 encoder could be the problem here? I recently had to reinstall all my tools (Audacity, LAME, CP4) and this issue never happened to me previously.

Thanks again.

Andrew

[ksfowler]

Hmm. I personally didn't have to reinstall anything. Have you tried adjusting the settings within the track itself? If you select the down arrow next "Audio Trac" on the left side of the actual track, you can set the Sample Format there as well.

Let me state this though, I had to rerecord my audio from scratch using these settings. I tried to export existing audio as 16 bit and it didn't work.

Hope this helps.

Shawn

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[alight9010]

I did try to change the sample format when the file was opened in Audacity but, the exported file still resulted in 32-bit float. Further up stream, I have video files (mp4) from which I'm stripping the audio to MP3. I may need to look at that stripping process closer to see if I can force the 16-bit format.

Thanks again for your help.

Andrew

[alight9010]

Just out of curiosity Shawn, what version of Audacity are you using? I'm on the latest (1.2.6).

[alight9010]

I think I've gotten this solved. I was encoding the original audio at 48000 Hz. When I changed that to 44100Hz, then edited the file in Audacity, exported as MP3, imported to CP4, the resulting sound was a million times better. Oddly, I'm still creating MP3 files that are 32-bit float - I can't seem to NOT do this with Audacity no matter what I try. But they sound fine in CP4 which is all that I care about in the end.

Anyway, thanks again for your responsiveness on this and I hope this helps someone else out there.... someday.

a

[ksfowler]

Hi,

I'm glad you got things figured out. I know that before I got mine working, I was about to go crazy. Hopefully this process will be much easier for other people who encounter this problem.

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