{"id":160,"date":"2011-05-27T12:57:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-27T12:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shockwave-sound.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/27\/higher-sound-quality-previews-on-our\/"},"modified":"2017-08-09T06:43:53","modified_gmt":"2017-08-09T06:43:53","slug":"higher-sound-quality-previews-on-our","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shockwave-sound.com\/blog\/higher-sound-quality-previews-on-our\/","title":{"rendered":"Higher sound quality previews on our older tracks"},"content":{"rendered":"<div dir=\"ltr\" style=\"text-align: left;\" trbidi=\"on\">\n<div class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.shockwave-sound.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/preview-player.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;\"><img decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" src=\"https:\/\/www.shockwave-sound.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/preview-player.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<p><b>Back in the day<\/b> (i.e. before 2010) \ud83d\ude09 we used to create all our preview audio files in 56-kbps MP3 format, with a <i>&#8220;preview&#8230;. shockwave-sound&#8230;.&#8221;<\/i> voice that was mixed in at a fixed volume.<\/p>\n<p>From about December 2010 onwards we started making our preview audio in 128-kbps MP3 files (higher fidelity, more clarity) and also with a <i>&#8220;preview&#8230;. shockwave-sound&#8230;&#8221;<\/i> voice that was both mixed at a lower volume generally, and that also changes in volume dynamically depending on how loud the music is at the moment. So if there is a really quiet part in the music, the preview voice is also at a low volume. And vice versa.<\/p>\n<p>This did however leave our older tracks sounding a bit &#8220;second grade&#8221;. There were some 5,500 tracks, all with multiple versions \/ edits \/ mixes, and a total of <b>38,770 &#8220;old&#8221; preview files<\/b> on our server, and with a bit-rate of only 56 kbps and with a <i>preview<\/i> voice that was, at times, way too loud, these tracks just didn&#8217;t sound as attractive as our newer tracks.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway &#8211; we have now just finished the rather large task of updating all those 38,770 older preview files to the &#8220;new&#8221; format. We had some good people working on automating this task, so it wasn&#8217;t as bad as we had feared. It took us a few days of audio file processing, plus about 10 hours of solid uploading. Now all our tracks &#8211; old and new &#8211; have preview files with a nice clarity of sound, and a <i>preview<\/i> voice that shouldn&#8217;t be too obtrusive.<\/p>\n<p>Just one of the several upgrades and improvements we are working on here at Shockwave-Sound.com this spring\/summer.&nbsp; <\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Back in the day (i.e. before 2010) \ud83d\ude09 we used to create all our preview audio files in 56-kbps MP3 format, with a &#8220;preview&#8230;. shockwave-sound&#8230;.&#8221; voice that was mixed in at a fixed volume. From about December 2010 onwards we started making our preview audio in 128-kbps MP3 files (higher fidelity, more clarity) and also [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":771,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[123,122],"class_list":["post-160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-shockwave-sound","tag-preview-files","tag-technical"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shockwave-sound.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shockwave-sound.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shockwave-sound.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shockwave-sound.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shockwave-sound.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.shockwave-sound.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":772,"href":"https:\/\/www.shockwave-sound.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions\/772"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shockwave-sound.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shockwave-sound.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shockwave-sound.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shockwave-sound.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}