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edwardp46904841
Participant
June 7, 2022
Question

Length of audio is different lengths in different applications

  • June 7, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 454 views

I believe this is my first post but have been using Adobe Audition for a podcast for about 7 years. We're launching internet radio and am having trouble with the length of the audio being different in different applications. We always use CBR, since it's audio only but am at a loss what to do. He thought we could be saving the files at some point as VBR files but I couldn't confirm that.

 

Does anyone have any words of wisdom on how I should troubleshoot this? Thanks for your input!

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1 reply

SteveG_AudioMasters_
Community Expert
SteveG_AudioMasters_Community Expert
Community Expert
June 7, 2022

Well, if you've saved the files using VBR the best the software can do is estimate how long it will decode to, and there's nothing you can do about that, I'm afraid - different apps use different algorithms to guess at I mean 'calculate' the run time. There are often small discrepancies in the reported time anyway; the only way you can be moderately sure of how long a program actually is, is to open the encoded file in Audition, and see what it decodes to in that. The chances are that even if you get a different figure from some other app, the actual play time will be the Audition-reported time. This should work, as the actual decoding algorithm is fixed - it's just the time estimate that can't be judged without actually doing it.

 

The problem with VBR is that the actual bit rate being streamed out doesn't alter - but for any given short bit stream (depending on how much masking it's doing) the actual amount of audio (in time) can alter. Not much, but by the time you've been running it for 30 minutes, it can add up to quite a bit. The V in VBR alters the rate during the encoding process - it's not a playback thing at all.

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edwardp46904841Author
Participant
June 8, 2022

Thanks for replying Steve, if the file was saved as a VBR at some point, is there a way to fix that. I'm not sure how the station records it but when I get it, it's in a CBR format. I use the CBR format too so it's a mystery to me. I took one of the files on our internet radio and opened it in adobe audition and it was different than what Windows showed too. I think the answer you gave is that this can't be fixed and I should go with the data in AA and manually adjust the time. Am I understanding you correctly? Thanks again for the input, I couldn't figure it out... 🙂

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