Stacking multiple media players to play multiple tracks for the same song (stems), the sync between them is not precise. It looks like the real time conversion of MP3s creates timing issues.
Right now, I prefer to convert or export all separate tracks as .wav to have them perfectly synced.
Is there a way to fix this issue?
Brad is probably the one to give a definitive reply…
…but I’ll just say that I’ve had sync problems with MP3 files in the past, probably (at least my assumption) due to all the data compression/expansion chicanery that’s going on behind the scenes. I now never use MP3 for backing tracks. In fact I use 24-bit WAV files. Never had a problem since.
TBH I rarely use MP3 files nowadays - maybe just for rough mixes for clients who expect them. Their day is over AFAIAC. Storage is cheap and streaming speeds are no problem for audio files. If I want data compression I use FLAC, which allows for re-expansion back to full-quality WAV, if ever required - something that MP3 cannot offer.
Media player drift is always a risk when having multiple separate media players.
When I need files in full sync, I tend to use multichannel .wav files in one media player. Cantabile’s media player supports multichannel WAV, and you can configure multiple output ports for a media player and then route the channels to these different output ports. That allows separate post-processing and mixing.
So best combine your stems to a multichannel WAV file; this will normally ensure best synchronicity.
I haven’t tried multi-channel FLAC yet - could also be an interesting option storage-wise.
@Torsten thanks for the suggestion, interesting, and I’ll definitely try it. However, I never have sync issues when using several media players stacked playing .WAV files.
@The_Elf thank you for the feedback. Sometime I get MP3 files from my colleagues and, to be quick, I loaded them into media players, then I discovered some sync issues, so I realized it was caused by the MP3 files as Cantabile makes a realtime conversion to .wav
Yeah, often you have to just deal with what you’re given. It’s up to the likes of us to educate people out of MP3. Unfortunately it’s going to be a tough job, but we need to start somewhere.
That was my approach as well in my early days with Cantabile
But like @The_Elf, I have no problem with multiple media players all playing back WAV files. I moved to that approach when we completely revamped the set list in Welsh Floyd and I redid all the backing tracks. I ended up with a MEDIA player per channel as it was easy to adjust the relative mix during rehearsal, with the intent I would then bounce down to a single WAV. However as there were no issues with multiple WAV playback (in terms of load or sync) I never bothered.
Good to know! For the moment, I’m living mostly with split-stereo MP3 simply for storage reasons (I keep my Cantabile stuff in a Dropbox to sync across three devices), but great to have other options using WAV.