Ableton Forum

ok, just an idea:
using mp3s in live like wavs is quite complicated
to implement and a cpu problem it seems.
so ableton probably won´t do it.

on the other hand djs have the problem of
overfilled disks because the size of wavs.

so what about this:
when you select a mp3 in the browser you
can preview it as it is, without warping and stuff.
if you drag a song (or sample) in live, the mp3
is converted into wav (conversion speed should
depend on how much cpu speed the running set
leaves) and the wav is used.
when you delete it from live track you are asked if
the wav file should be deleted. just choose yes.
the wav is deleted, the asd files stay on the disk.
so if you import the mp3 again, the warp markers
are still intact.

same with complete sets including mp3s.
when opening the set the used mp3s are converted
to wav (should not take too long), when you
close the set the wavs are deleted again.

this would slow down importing and set opening
a little but would save LOTS of disk space and
ableton would not have to develop a complete
mp3-live-machine...

hope all this is clear...what do you think about it?

I agree, LIVE should really support MP3 files in SOME capacity, all I want it to do is IMPORT mp3s by converting the file to a WAV or AIFF for your session, similar to the way ProTools does.

It would really speed things up - right now I need to dip out into Peak just to convert files... Peak could probably do it with a small update.

I just logged on to put in a wishlist for MP3 export as it's pretty important to me and after I've cut a master to CD I delete the wav because it takes so much hard disk space - it just seems like alot of unnecessary double handling to convert to wav to work on it, render the final mix to wav and then mp3 it- not to mention the potential to lose quality via different codecs or whatever

what you've suggested here sounds like a perfect compromise

especially as more and more online record stores open up - I'm certainly going to be coming mostly from mp3s as opposed to vinyl from now on.

as much as i understand the difficulty of adding full mp3 support, i'm definitely in favor of adding some mp3-in and -out conversion. especially since the wave editor that i had been using to do those conversions stopped working, and the one i'm using now is REALLY slow and often crashes with big files.

plus direct rip from audio CD within the browser

MP3 support would be very, very cool & make life a lot easier! Not mention helping to keep hard disk storage requirements low.

At least some sort of interface to convert MP3 etc. to WAV would be a start - I have to dip out to other software to do this.

Peace!