clicking noise in audio Final Cut Studio 2.0

[Marc152d]

hello everyone,
I have often made background music on garage band, exported it to MP3, and imported it into FCS with no problems. But today I did the same, and when I place the music in the timeline ,it has an audible clicking noise, almost like the metronome in that it is consistent. Oddly, it doesnt play when I listen to the audio clip in th viewer..its only after I have it rendered. Any ideas?
thanks,
Marc

 

[spinnerlys]

You can circumvent the clicking noise by using .aiff instead of .mp3.

It's uncompressed and more suitable for editing.

The viewer for example has nothing to do with the sequence settings and can view any material in any form (readable by FCP of course) you want without rendering.

But as soon as you add something to the timeline/sequence, it has to be conform to the settings.
I don't know much about the audio part of FCP's sequence settings, but Avid for example converts the .mp3 to an .aiff during import, to avoid such issue.

 

[arjen92]

don't degrade your sound, use .aiff

 

[treehorn]

I'll second that.

For some reason, FCP does a lousy job rendering audio from mp3 to aif and the clicks develop as a result.

Make sure that it's exported as an aif file and that it is 48kHz (default is usually 44kHz). If you're unable to re-export your Garageband track into aif, you should convert it in another program, such as Amadeus, Switch, etc. That should fix it as well.

 

[Marc152d]

You can circumvent the clicking noise by using .aiff instead of .mp3.

It's uncompressed and more suitable for editing.

The viewer for example has nothing to do with the sequence settings and can view any material in any form (readable by FCP of course) you want without rendering.

But as soon as you add something to the timeline/sequence, it has to be conform to the settings.
I don't know much about the audio part of FCP's sequence settings, but Avid for example converts the .mp3 to an .aiff during import, to avoid such issue.

Thank you for the information, that worked perfectly. I guess even though it has the ability to import MP3's, AIFF is the way to go with FC.

 

[spinnerlys]

Thank you for the information, that worked perfectly. I guess even though it has the ability to import MP3's, AIFF is the way to go with FC.

To go as uncompressed as one can with audio and video is always the way to go.

That's why MPEG-2 and -4 are not meant for video editing, and .aiffs don't take up that much space (10MByte/min) compared to uncompressed video (1.2GByte/min in 1:1 PAL in Avid for example).

 

[treehorn]

I don't know much about the audio part of FCP's sequence settings, but Avid for example converts the .mp3 to an .aiff during import, to avoid such issue.

It doesn't do it automatically. When you place the mp3 (or a segment of it) into the sequence/timeline, it comes up with a red "must render' bar over it. And when you render it (which takes only a few seconds, usually) it converts it to the proper format. But lately FCP is doing a really crappy job of it (I don't remember having as many clicks in the past - and I'm always having clients sending me audio as MP3).