hey,

i dunno about everyone else, but i'm getting kinda tired of all of the rapidshare...yousendit...etc files people keep posting, so i've taken it upon myself to make a little tutorial on how to upload a sample to the TA. your links to rapidshare and yousendit break after a few downloads and really are a waste of time...upload it to TA and it'll stay on TA til it gets id'd. not only that, but it will go into the TA stream so that's good...

anyway...here we go...


where to get the software?

go to the TA homepage and find the Software section at the top of the screen...




in this section you'll find two programs...you'll need them both. Mp3DirectCut allows you to snip a sample from a larger mp3 as we'll see in a moment. MpegSuite allows you to lower the quality so that the file size is small enough to upload on TA.




making your sample....

the first program we need is Mp3 DirectCut. open your track and find the place you want to start your sample. when you've found the right place select "select begin", circled in green, so it will select that as the start of the sample. let the sample run and when you get to the stopping point, hit "set end", circled in red, to set the boundaries for the sample.

note: for the encoding instructions i'll give, make sure the sample is not longer than 1 minute when encoding in mono, circled in black is the total length of the sample, otherwise the sample will be too large and you'll have to make a smaller one. i personally like to encode in stereo because it has a little better sound quality, but when doing this keep samples under 40sec.




now that you have your sample outlined, go up to file and select "save selection", this will ensure that it will only save the section that you've outlined above.




Encoding your sample...

now that we have our sample, we need to decrease the bit rate to something small enough to meet the TA requirements. first we need to check out the "configure" tab, circled in black, to set the parameters that we'll convert the sample at.

when choosing your codec set it to the "plugger+" setting. as i mentioned above, depending on the length of your sample, either choose mono or stereo for the mode. once again...chose mono for 1min long samples and stereo for samples under 40sec.

the green circles show the different output directories for each of the different tools, since we'll use the "converter" we only really care about that one, but i would just set them all to the same thing and make them easy to find. just to keep things easy...make sure you choose a different output directory from the folder your sample is currently saved.




now head over to the converter tab. find the file for your current sample and when you click on it, it should pop up to the right in the first column. select the sample and use the arrows to move it over telling the converter that is the file you wish to convert. click convert (we didn't choose a priority so just click "ok" when it pops up) and it should take just a second.




uploading to TA...

now you should have a sample that is small enough to upload to the unknown tracks forum. go make your thread and find the tab at the bottom that says "click to select file". when you click it it'll open up a browser to select your sample. go ahead and find it and submit it...



if you did everything correctly you should get a message like the one below which basically says you're sample uploaded successfully. if you file is too large or corrupt, you will get a different error message stating what is wrong...





tada!!! you got the sample up and now everyone will love you because they can id your tune without having to go to a separate download page!!

i hope people find this helpful...i'm sure once you get used to it you'll realize how quick it is to upload samples to TA and trust me it's a lot better...

feel free to post in here if you have any problems with any of the info above, but i think it's pretty straight forward...


ps. a lot of times people upload samples, but then click on them and they don't play. well...it takes a little time usually for the sample to upload to the system so just give it a little time. if it doesn't work after an hour or two...i'd pm a mod and ask for assistance...

Last edited by Floorfiller on Aug-26-2005 at 06:54