Greetings from Tasmania from an old man who would appreciate some help.
I have two files of an orchestral concert which I want to merge synchronously and save as one combined file.
I have a .mp4 video and I have an added .flac audio from the same downloaded concert stream.
I have successfully exported a combined file but the audio bitrate is reduced from 3125kpbs to 566kpbs.
I cannot find a way of exporting them into one file that combines the video from the original .mp4 and the original audio from the .flac file without this significant loss loss of audio quality.
Is this currently possible and, if so, how?
If not, would the Shotcut team consider adding this feature?
Alternatively, does anyone know of any other cheap and user friendly software that I might try?
Did you change anything to make the output audio codec FLAC? It is probably not a good idea to put FLAC into MP4 even if Shotcut permits it, and I do not think there is another audio compression for MP4 that is lossless. Why do you need MP4? MOV and Matroska are more flexible.
I have already successfully exported such a combined .mp4flac using shotgut, which works perfectly but the audio bitrate is only 566kpbs, whereas the original flac audio bitrate is 3145kbps. I was hoping it would retain the original audio quality.
The only reason I’m pursuing .mp4 combined video/flac is that I already have about 100 such videos that play perfectly in VLC player.
Would you consider ALAC (Apple Lossless) audio instead of FLAC? ALAC is officially supported in MP4, so there wouldn’t be compatibility concerns that way.
Like Dan said, FLAC is much more supported in MKV than MP4.
In theory, lossless is lossless regardless of size. If one encoding is 500kbps but another is 3000kbps, and they’re both lossless, then that simply means the 500kbps encoding is more efficient (and probably took longer to make). Are you able to hear any degradation in the 500kbps version? You could export the original and 500kbps FLAC files as WAV and see if they are bit-for-bit identical or not, with obvious differences in the headers.
Thank you Dan and Austin for your responses and your willingness to help, which I really appreciate.
I tried MKV with the same result except that the file was larger. The .flaC audio bitrate remained limited in both to 556k, which I suspect is simply the limit currently set by the export parameters.
Your comment concerning .flaC set me wondering and I found this explanation which made sense to me:
Because I have been listening to concerts in .mp4 with .flaC @ around 3000k and because I now have some more concerts where I have separate .mp4 videos and similarly hi-res .flac files @ around the same bitrate, I thought it only made sense to try to aim for that highest level of quality.
Hopefully, in due course, software programs like shotcut and vlc will increase the limits they can handle in exporting combined videos, as demand for audiophile quality increases eg. as it has done with streaming companies like Quobus for audio and the Digital Concert Hall for video.
Of course, I accept that the differences in actual listening experience may be minimal, even with the high quality audio equipment I can enjoy.
Hi @mac1, for me, that’s the crucial thing to worry about, and not whether it has a different bitrate…
As an experiment, I took a classical FLAC recording, and converted it to Mp3.
Then I loaded each into SC, and cut out random sections of each, so the FLAC and Mp3 played alternately.
I frankly am struggling to hear much, if any difference between the two.
And if my ear hadn’t had the opportunity to use the other track as a reference point, I would be more than happy with the quality of either of these tracks.
So bitrate etc wouldn’t be a concern to me personally, but I appreciate that audiophiles often go to great lengths to consider bitrates and related technical aspects, in pursuing the best possible sound achievable.
Lossless is lossless is lossless. All bitrates are the same quality because no uncompressed data is lost. Some songs may compress easier than others because their data pattern lends to better compression (like silent sections). Or, one encoder may be more efficient than another encoder because it used a more complex algorithm to get space savings. Or, one song may be 5.1 surround at 96kHz while another is stereo at 48kHz.
Speaking of which, the default FLAC output of Shotcut is 16-bit. To get 24-bit, add this to the Export > Advanced > Other tab:
sample_fmt=s32
Despite being called 32-bit, I think I remember reading somewhere that the encoder actually writes 24-bit to disk. Even at this higher bit depth, my test encodings are at 590kbps.
The odd part to me is FLAC at 3000kbps. Typical uncompressed WAV is 24 bits times 2 channels times 48000 samples per second which equals 2304kbps. Why is FLAC producing a higher bitrate than uncompressed WAV? That makes no sense unless there are more than two channels or a higher sample rate in the source, and Shotcut is reducing it to stereo 16-bit.
FLAC doesn’t have any parameters to set bitrate. If it did, and somebody forced a really low bitrate, FLAC could not guarantee a lossless encoding if the bitrate was too low. Some FLAC encoders offer an “effort” parameter where the user can determine how much time and CPU it will use, which allows a tradeoff between speed and small size. But the end result is always lossless at whatever bitrate the encoder determined was necessary to guarantee lossless quality.
My sincere thanks to you all for taking the trouble to clarify all this for me…I really appreciate it.
I am not one of those people obsessed with numbers.
Most of the classical concerts I am watching/listening to are 1080p and around 24bit 4800 1300kbps lossless .flaC and I was simply trying to match the output with the input in order to preserve the original values because that made sense to me, based on all the usual guidelines regarding settings.
I am happy to accept your asurances that the different bitrates in the input to and the export from shotgut makes no meaningful difference.
I agree that it is my listening experience that ultimately matters and that I am unlikely to ever notice any appreciable difference between the the original 1300 and shotcut’s exported 566 bitrates.
And I wish to express again my appreciation to the developers and support team that shotcut has provided software that enables me to achieve the quality that I can.
So thanks again.
Cheers
Scott
Ps. And thanks for the advice about the 24bit setting, which I will enable…even if this too will make no appreciable difference.
