Why does the audio beep in Final Cut Pro?

[Luis Ortega]

When I lay down an audio track from an mp3 file in FCP and hit the space bar to preview it, all I hear are beeps. If I scrub the timeline the audio is there. Doing any sort of preview render doesn't help get rid of the beeps.
Can anyone please advise me what to do or what I am doing wrong?
Thanks for any advice.

 

[Scooby_Doo]

For as long as I can remember (although I haven't used the latest FC Studio), Apple has refused to let the program recognize MP3 files as native.

As I understand it FC only accepts non-compressed audio to be played back. That means you'll have to convert the MP3 file to .AIFF or .WAV format and then import it into FC. You can use iTunes (in the Advanced menu) or an open source program like Audacity to convert the files.

This is frustrating given that, if I remember correctly, iMovie handles Mp3 and AAC files just fine.

 

[northernmunky]

For editing, it's best not to used any form of compressed files to work with. It beeps because mp3 is not a file FCP will work with on the timeline unless you render it.

What I usually do is just load the mp3 into quicktime, do a 'File > Export' and export to AIFF to match the audio settings of your sequence (probably 48khz) and you can lay it down on the timeline no problem.

 

[Fomaphone]

i use a great app called Switch for my audio conversion and highly recommend it.

 

[Luis Ortega]

Thanks, everyone.
Yes, it was the mp3 file that is not compatible. It's fairly easy to change right in FCP by just using export audio to aiff and then bringing it back into the project.

 

[dcubed20]

Alternatively, in the short term you can just Render (apple-R) it

 

[latenight]

Wow! thanks, I was going crazy but used a program called smart convert to convert mp3 to a WAV format and everything worked great!

 

[Kevin Monahan]

Wow! thanks, I was going crazy but used a program called smart convert to convert mp3 to a WAV format and everything worked great!

The reason is because in FCP the audio you imported doesn't match the sequence settings. Most MP3s don't have the same sample rate.

Better to create a AIFF from the MP3. Rendering it will be broken as soon as you move the clip in the timeline.

In Premiere Pro, you can put the MP3s right in the timeline with no conversion or rendering.

 

[dhgeyer]

Did they fix this in FCPX? You folks scared me, as I am a relatively new FCPX user. So I immediately dragged several mp3 files directly into the timeline of a project just to see if there was a problem, and there was not. I even moved them around the timeline to make sure that wasn't a problem. So far mp3 files seem to work just fine. Am I missing something?

 

[Consultant]

Did they fix this in FCPX? You folks scared me, as I am a relatively new FCPX user. So I immediately dragged several mp3 files directly into the timeline of a project just to see if there was a problem, and there was not. I even moved them around the timeline to make sure that wasn't a problem. So far mp3 files seem to work just fine. Am I missing something?

There was no FCPX in 2009, when this thread was originally posted.

 

[cgbier]

I haven't used MP3 yet. Is the MP3 click-issue resolved?