Cubase sx3: recording to MP3 instead of .WAV?

[jj2man]

Hey friendly recordingreview.com members,

Question: When I record using cubase SX3, the default setting is to record to a .wav file. On less important projects, I need to record to .mp3 or some format that takes up less space because this is taking up an insane amount of space on my hard disk.

I know, I know...mp3 is shitty and .wav is better, yadda yadda. Suffice to say that quality doesn't matter on these particular mini-projects i'm refering to. And there are thousands of them, so you can imagine my dillema.

I've already done project->project setup->record file type. But it seems there's no option here other than .wav.

Can someone please help? I would greatly appreciate this!

Thanks!

[richiebee]

MP3 is a compressed format. It requires encoding. The overhead on your computers processor would make it very uneconomical to use for recording. I understand that in this instance you don't care, but Cubase is professional software that gets used in real studios. It's not a feature anyone would want.

Spend $100 on a new massive hard drive, or archive your projects in .RAR format. Or both!

You could also switch to a destructive editor like Sound Forge. It would record in WAV format, but when you go to save, you could save as MP3 and the WAV file would be lost as soon as you move on.



R.

[jj2man]

That is a shame...

I am a professional recording artist, but not a professional engineer. I just need cubase to map out my songs before I go to my "real" recording studio and let the experts do their job. I was using adobe audition/cooleditpro for a while, but it kept crashing. Somebody told me this was the best option for my purposes. I just didn't realize it would take up so much space.

Shame. If you know of another alternative, I'd love to hear about it...

[richiebee]

How big is your hard drive and how many channels are you recording?

[jj2man]

500 gigs, but only about 20 gigs of free space left. have a lot of movies and music

i usually record anywhere between 5 and 12 channels.

[garageband]

Originally Posted by jj2man

500 gigs, but only about 20 gigs of free space left. have a lot of movies and music

i usually record anywhere between 5 and 12 channels.

It seems wrong to make your music pay the price here. Compared to video, even 48/24 takes up very little by comparison. $100 for a good-sized HD that you will literally be forever to fill up with recording. My first separate HD I ever bought when starting out was 9GB and that seemed like all the storage in the world. The one I use for active recording is 250GB and it's immense. Figure a fairly involved song is only going to be about 500MB-1GB.

[Audio~Geek]

Last band I recorded was 5 songs, 30GB, a tiny dent in my 500GB recording drive.

I'd NEVER record direct to mp3, 16/44.1 is BAD ENOUGH!!

[Electriclight]

Originally Posted by jj2man

That is a shame...

I am a professional recording artist, but not a professional engineer. I just need cubase to map out my songs before I go to my "real" recording studio and let the experts do their job. I was using adobe audition/cooleditpro for a while, but it kept crashing. Somebody told me this was the best option for my purposes. I just didn't realize it would take up so much space.

Shame. If you know of another alternative, I'd love to hear about it...

Audacity is a free audio recording program that would let you render your files to MP3, and then you could delete the original files.

Newegg had a Terabyte external drive last week for $79.

[jono not bono]

as far as it taking up so much space.... Its important to remember to remove unused media and empty the files in the audio pool (The unused media) and click the trash button.

Sometimes when I'm tracking my band, after an hour or constantly recording (trying to get the best take etc) the audio pool will have about 5 gigs of files just sitting in the pool. Every single time you record a take, and then delete it from the project window (maybe because its not correct) it doesn't mean its been deleted and they all build up.... Its so you can always go back in case you liked an earlier take etc

This could be why you are using up so much space...Or your hard drive is just simply made out of a floppy disk haha

I would never record to MP3, and as someone else pointed out, it is a compressed file so you have to record something, then the something gets processed into an mp3 so unless your computer works with telepathy or time travel its just a shit way of recording. Just encode the file into MP3 afterwards etc

Hope this helped, and if it didn't, well, I'll put a claw hammer through my forehead haha

Jono_not_Bono

[vl316jesus]

Hi guys,

Thanks for your post. It gave me a lot of ideas. I am also using Cubase SX3 (by H2O team). I am on my way to a small project, I need your help, please any one of you let me know "How to make 'Audition' and 'Master track'?". Please some one help me out of my

Thanks
VL