What's the best format audio to upload to Soundcloud ?

Steinberg Lounge
10

I don’t know why Cubase doesn’t support it (WaveLab doesn’t either, although that’s changing with 8.5 I hear.)

But when uploading to YouTube, this is my workflow:

  1. Render music out to WAV at 44.1kHz, 24-bit.
  2. Import WAV into my video editor (Sony Movie Studio or Camtasia) and edit the video.
  3. Render the video as MP4 with AAC audio.
  4. Upload to YouTube. (Here’s an example.) The audio in that clip was actually rendered out during an earlier Cubase session from the one shown in the video. I just imported the pre-existing WAV and synced it to the video.

So it doesn’t matter (for me) that Cubase doesn’t do AAC; I rely on my video editor for that.

I upload 44.1kHz (and sometimes 48kHz) 24-bit WAV files to SoundCloud only for things like hardware or softsynth shootouts where people might want to be able to download the original recordings for hi-fi listening.

For just songs or whatever, I prefer uploading to SoundCloud as MP3, so folks can download it to their iPods.

My workflow there might be a little… uh different; I don’t know what most other SoundClouders do.

  1. I render out from Cubase as WAV (again, 44.1/24).
  2. Open it in WaveLab for loudness normalization.
  3. Use the LAME encoder to generate an MP3 file with “-V1 -h” (high quality VBR).
  4. Open the MP3 in iTunes, touch up all the ID3 tags, and add artwork.
  5. Upload to SoundCloud. (Here’s the SoundCloud version of my earlier example.)