A

Anonymous

Question

How to change the default audio filetype in CS5.5?

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
December 13, 2012
4 replies
25389 views

I begin recording in the Multitrack and 5.5 insists on saving it as a .wav file. At our company we only record at 320Kbps, 48Khz, Stereo .mp3 files. How can I change the default in 5.5?

This topic has been closed for replies.

hobsonmedia

Participant

I've read this entire thread (many months after it was launched) because I, too, was searching for the obvious default so many have been clamoring for. I appreciate the suggestions of a workaround, but find myself stunned at the oddness of Bob's arguments.

Does he have some sort of authority in the Audition world? If so, I can't fathom being on the receiving end of so many clear consumer requests for something simple, and repeatedly replying to those requests by essentially questioning the knowledge/ability of the consumers.

Bob, it would be immensely simpler to create an update, share the plug-in, and have everyone happy. Those who choose not to use it, wouldn't. The rest of us would face the oh-so-perilous journey of working with mp3.

What am I missing here?

AudioGuru-vZElno

Participant

I've ran across this thread a few times in the past, researching how to change the default "save as" format, and thought the same thing about Bob's replies.

Quite simply, I think the misunderstanding is most of us are not editing .MP3's numerous times. We record as .WAV and save as .MP3's. I know that I record directly into Audition, which could be TV audio, voice work, guitar, etc., I then edit and then save the mix-down to an .MP3, which is then emailed out so radio stations have access to the clips. (I work for a radio prep service.)

I realize this feature request seems small to some, but to me it was a big deal. I still use Audition 1.5 99% of the time because of this missing feature. I usually only switch to 6 to take advantage of the auto crossfading as that makes short work of some of the editing I need to do.

After reading the later replies I think by creating a couple of shortcuts I can do what I need to do. I just did a quick "Ctl-A" to "Select All" and then a "Ctl-S" to "Save Selection As" and it seems to work fine.

Bob, I realize a few seconds, and a few extra clicks, isn't a big deal to most people, but I went back and looked, in the last 10 years I've recorded / edited / saved and sent over 61,000 clips, so, yes, while those few seconds do make a difference, more than that, those few less mouse clicks will cause less damage on someone like me that has serious repetitive stress injures from doing their job.

AudioGuru

P.S. Thanks Adobe for putting this on the radar.

W

w0lfling

Participant

I have a completely different reason for asking this thread's question; storage.

We have the need for lossless editing, yes, so MP3 is not an option except for distribution. BUT, we are a donation-based organisation where everything is distributed free. We have to save up to buy DIs, let alone more storage. So with the amount of recording we do (twice a day) 0.5GB per track on a 17-track recording and have to archive everything. So that's a lot of wasted space using WAV files. Since most media is moving from AAC and MP3 to FLAC, it'd be great to have a setup where I could either live record to FLAC, or auto convert all the WAV files to FLAC on first save.

Reaper does this, but we can't afford to retrain everyone to use it. At the moment, though, it looks like we might have to.

SteveG_AudioMasters_

Community Expert

w0lfling wrote:

Since most media is moving from AAC and MP3 to FLAC, it'd be great to have a setup where I could either live record to FLAC, or auto convert all the WAV files to FLAC on first save.

It sounds as though it would make sense to add this to the Export options. Audition could only ever live-record to its internal working format, and that's only available in multitrack mode anyway. But some means of establishing a default Export option and having a single keystroke to activate it does seem like a reasonable option, considering all of the previous discussion in the thread.

B

BitBangBoom

Participating Frequently

Well, this is a bit heartbreaking. We're jumping from Aud 3.0 to Aud 6.0. I'm working with a test machine before rolling it out to staff, and was dumbfounded when I could see no apparent way to set a default save format. If I understand the discussion here, this was a design decision by Adobe.

Has anyone found a workaround? If you primarily save to one specific format, can you tell me how this has affected your workflow? Advice, anyone?

If Adobe is reading this, count me in with the many producers who are disappointed by the disappearance of the default format prefs screen. Here's why: Ordinarily, there are only two formats I use. One is a custom WAV format, 44.1kbps, 16 bits. It triggers a special plug-in that writes a custom header. When it was set as the default, then my Save operation involved a single keystroke.

But now it seems I have to run the gauntlet of a Save dialogue with multiple pull-down menus. Worse, I have to teach my staff, many of whom have very limited experience, to ALWAYS look at EVERY menu in that dialogue and select the same ones. A wrong setting in bit-depth, samplerate or channel number will NOT trigger a warning—but the exported file will later fail in our playback system. My one-click operation is now a several-click operation, with several areas for error to creep in. Adobe, really?

V

voiceimaging

Participating Frequently

To my knowlege there has been no attempt to update CS6 to default to whatever standard you want it to be. Perhaps somebody here has learned of it, but I've contacted Adobe and nothing yet. I feel your pain. My workaround was to purchase another program, which I'm sure is not in Adobe's master plan. But you and I need to be productive and your 7 step scenario as opposed to 1 step sounds worse than cumbersome and more like impossible to translate to your staff. Especially since CS6 will do just about everything under the sun! Not having an opportunity to have a default save is like missing turn signals on a car for heavy producers.

C

Charles Sullivan

Participating Frequently

I think a lot of the people in favor or the WAV setting are completely missing the point. The fact that it isn't an option is really annoying. I myself need to go through thousands of voice tracks that I'm sent on a regular basis, add a beds, SFX, and any other bells and whistles to make a spot. Once I'm done with this it is either dubbed straight into our audio server to be played on air or (and this is the key feature right here) saved as an MP3 to be given to the client through email. Every time I have to click through to get to the BOTTOM of the list to get to MP3, I'm wasting time that could be spent on the next element. Am I exporting the entire session to WAV? Nope, I just save the session. If there are changes because (and most people in spot production understand this) the client has a change, I just open the session. I am a very keyboard intensive worker and so far the only things that have helped me save time is tabbing to file type, hit "End", and then Up on the keyboard. HOWEVER, you can't just push "Enter" from there, you would then need to Shift+Tab up to the directory field or tab all the way to save on the bottom of the pop-up menu.

I don't care what the Pro-WAV format people have to say. It's not a matter of quality to some of us, it's a matter of time that we don't have.

ryclark

Participating Frequently

All Audition's internal recording and processing is done as .wav files. When the recording is finished you can then do a Save As to save the file as a .mp3 to your requirements. Remember if you are editing the audio always use the .wav file as mp3 file format is lossy. If you save as mp3 and then reopen the file to edit it it will be opened as a wav file in Audition. If you then save again as mp3 you will lose even more quality each time you open and resave an mp3 file.

C

canadave_nyc

Participating Frequently

I don't think that's what the OP was referring to. I have the same question. When we bring up "Save As", the initial file type that Audition assumes we want to save to is WAV. How can we change it so that the initial file type it thinks we want to save to is MP3?

C

canadave_nyc

Participating Frequently

I see what you mean. New files without a source "format" did default to the last-used format under File > Save As... with Audition 3. This was changed in Audition CS since it was common for users to record and save to a compressed format accidentally. In order to minimize the risk of data or quality loss, new recordings or generated files default to WAV unless otherwise specified using File > Save As... The File > Export > File (CTRL+SHIFT+E) will retain the last used format no matter the source type.

I see. Thanks very much for the explanation (slightly astonishing to me though it may be). May I suggest that you folks simply supply a default setting that users can set? Most times people will be working with whatever format they use pretty exclusively; it would be nice to be able to simply set the default save format (to MP3, in my case) and just leave it alone).

Were there really that many people *accidentally* recording/saving to a compressed format? I find that hard to fathom. I mean, the save box shows the file format right there...?

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