Timestretching not perfect?

[fader8]

This discussion is purely academic. To the original poster, you don't EVER want to use mp3's if you want to timestretch the material, for various reasons besides just the timing difficulties. If it's just a short 4 bar loop for some "electro-beat" tune, that's different.

 

As for the intellectual masturbation part of this thread, sure, if you're making mp3's on the same Mac and sync'ing them to your wav or aif files, you'll likely be OK. But I can tell you from experience that getting mp3, AAC or mp4 files from clients that are supposed to "sync up", usually don't. I've noticed if it's been encoded on a windoze machine it's almost guaranteed to be screwed up.

 

This is an issue with the new breed of mpeg4 prosumer cameras too. I just had a job where the cam audio drifted out of sync with the Pro Tools capture by 200 frames after an hour, even though they were hard sync'd during the show.

 

The problem may not manifest itself in the encoding process, but rather in the decoding and converting back to PCM. There are a lot of rogue encoding schemes out there that all add their little tweak. So it may work out fine if decoded with the same app. Who knows, but then, who cares!?