Audio sourcing

[DopplerDo]

What is the best way to get editable audio? What do you guys use to acquire it legally?

I have my song ideas trapped in Spotify and am looking for the best way to get them into an editing program (Adobe Premiere, in my case)!

Thanks in advance, guys!

[Kireblue]

I typically just buy and download my music from Amazon

[DopplerDo]

And the format you download it in isn't rights protected? There's no process you have to go through to start editing with it?

[Qyot27]

And the format you download it in isn't rights protected? There's no process you have to go through to start editing with it?

Amazon uses MP3. MP3 can't be encrypted and still be playable by MP3 players.

iTunes uses AAC. While the files were distributed with encryption at the beginning of the iTunes Store's history (128kbps and encrypted *.m4p files), the use of encryption on the audio was completely phased out 8 years ago, after a couple of years where Apple offered 'iTunes Plus' (256kbps and no encryption, regular old *.m4a files) as an option for music from some companies.

In either case, it's technically possible to give those *.mp3 and *.m4a files to your video editor and it'd probably know what to do with them, but if you have to do any framerate correction (like for old versions of Premiere, where it's easier to edit in 24fps proper), you need to shift the working copy of the audio. So between that and simply being less error-prone in the editor, you can decode to uncompressed PCM (usually in a Wave file, or maybe AIFF if you're on a Mac) and edit with the uncompressed audio, then do the final mux with the original MP3 or AAC copy so you're not recompressing things.

Or you buy a CD and rip it yourself* as uncompressed PCM Wave, and compress it to whatever format you want after you're all done. Or for obscure bands, buy it from a place like Bandcamp that offers things in FLAC (and like ripping from a CD, you'd have the discretion to compress it to whatever format you want).


*to be honest, I do this automatically when I buy CDs, just to have them backed up. WAVE/CUE rip, which gets split into individual per-song files for compressing to AAC and Opus, but the original unsplit WAVE is converted to FLAC and then all the encodes are packed up in a 7z archive for whenever I need them next.