mp3 to Ableton live - Import problem

Performance & Techniques Music Production
1

mp3 to Ableton live - Import problem

Hello,

Surprisingly i couldn’t find anything precise about that so i’m asking you :

Why some .mp3 files can’t be imported to live ?
My live is in french, but the translation should give something like this : “The file XXXX.mp3 couldn’t be read. It may be damaged or don’t have any license”.

I don’t get it, when tracks come from beatport, how can they have a license issue ?
And i can play them without any problem in iTunes or Media player.. so they’re not damaged either.

As i was trying to solve the issue looking for answers on google, i saw a guy who randomly talked about space issues on the hdd. Is that what causes the problem ?
The think is i use differend hard disks for Live (on my SSD) and my samples/audio files (regular storage hdd), and i don’t want my SSD and it’s precious space filled with audio files etc.

Any help ?

2

i had the same problem …update quick time that is all.

3

had the same problem. updating quicktime works.

4

^^ What they said.

Ableton can’t read mp3, so all files get converted to .wav files when you load them into Ableton, and for that quick time is needed.

5

^ all the above is correct. another thing you could try is re-convert mp3 to mp3 through a software. sometimes it works for me.

6

I believe that could help, as the problem probably comes from Ableton having problems dealing with the output of certain encoders/versions without a recent version of quicktime installed, but I definetely would not recommend re-converting an mp3 file.

Each conversion leads to further degradation in sound quality, as the same steps to reduce file size while applied again to the same file. In the end your files nominally will still be 320 kbps files, the actual quality might be way below that because of the repeated conversions.

7

If you convert MP3 to WAV you get the exact bits as in MP3, i.e. no degradation.

8

I know, but andski suggested converting from mp3 to mp3, i.e. re-encode the file in order to circumvent the compatibility problems in ableton. And that would lead to degradation.