[Jenna]

I seem to be running into my first hiccup in working with these files. My DAW has an auto-publish feature for SoundCloud which is how I've been uploading them. That goes well. What doesn't go so well is trying to play them on my computer afterward. We have pretty fast internet service, but these files are taking forever to download and play it seems. I'm wondering if I should be saving them in a different format to make that process a little less time to consume and bandwidth friendly for others who might listen to them.

There is an option in the "Preferences" section that allows choosing among several levels of quality. I usually go for the middle of the road. If I decide to save in a lesser quality for uploading purposes, will that cause the file to lose quality for recording purposes?

[Yodasdad]

Are you having the same problem listening to other peoples songs on Soundcloud?

Regardless what format you upload in, soundcloud will convert them to it's own format for playback, in theory as I understand it, everyones music should be streaming at the same size/time.

For quality purposes, I would suggest uploading to souncloud in a lossless format such as .wav or .aiff, rather than mp3 if you have the option.

That's the highest quality and will suffer the least from the compression that Soundcloud applies.

Yodasdad

[Jenna]

I haven't been having the same problem with others recordings. Lossless format is what I've been uploading, although I don't recall the exact file type. On the other hand, we've been having internet outages of and on the last couple of days, so maybe it was a bandwidth issue inside and outside of our own walls. There's only so much to go around, and we typically do lag on the weekends a bit.

[Ramshackles]

I upload wavs to soundcloud and have no problem playing them back. Wavs are generally uncompressed...

You can do a test with mp3 to see how that works. They are fairly heavily compressed and therefore small, although you have to be listening fairly closely to notice a difference vs wavs!

[Jenna]

Alright, I got a glimpse of what I'm uploading and they're OGG files. The problem seems to be trying to play anything online while I have Mixcraft open. Everything works fine after I shut it down. I might start uploading .wav anyway to save on bandwidth for potential listeners.

[Yodasdad]

If it's only while you've got mixcraft open, it could possibly be that you CPU is overloaded, but I wouldn't have thought so, especially if mixcraft isn't actually doing anything demanding.

Possibly something to do with both of them accessing the soundcard at the same time?? I haven't come across this problem before so I'm just thinking out loud really.

Yodasdad

[Jenna]

I haven't got a clue but assumed the same as you. It's not set for exclusive use of the sound card, so most likely just a cheapo laptop sound card limitation. It's happening for both video and audio, so Youtube vids act the same way, they just hang and hang and hang. At least we got to the bottom of it. It's not the file size in that case, which was my first thought.

Now my only issue is resolving the backing being recorded with the vocals on the vocal tracks. I've put into the Mixcraft support to help with this one. Awaiting a reply.