I manually synchronized audio with text for a lesson I imported. Almost every time I advance to the next sentence, the synchronization is off until I refresh my browser, and then the synchronization is restored.
I’m using Chrome on Windows 11.
If I switch to Firefox, the timing is slightly different for every sentence, even after refreshing.
Am I doing something wrong, or is there something wrong with my browser settings? Is there a way to prevent this?
Can you provide example lesson URL? Thanks.
Here’s an example. I’ve manually adjusted the times repeatedly, but it seems that the audio keeps shifting slightly. Sometimes I’ll play a sentence, refresh the screen, and the audio has moved. Sometimes the audio in sentence mode doesn’t match the audio I get when I click “Edit sentence”. Sometime sentences are aligned the first time I play them, but are no longer aligned when I review them. The synchronization is good enough for page view, but doesn’t really work for sentence view.
Could this be a problem with the audio file? I thought I found a workaround, creating a new lesson with the same file, but then the same thing started happening again.
Have you tried saving the audio file as Wav format and test that in lingQ ? Or alternatively export it as a very high quality mp3 and use that.
I was having very weird syncing issues which went away after converting and using very high quality mp3/wav.
The mp3 I used was from the original source. Do you think the mp3 quality might be too low? The voice seems clear, and there’s almost no background noise.
i think it might be audio file issue based on past experience. One easy way to test is just convert it to Wav format and try that.
Had similar problem but I noticed it between Pc browser and phone app. it is not about what you hear quality ( clarity of voice, backgrd noise) but I think it has to do with the Mp3 bitrate. 256–320 kbps works well for me so far.
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Thanks. Wow. I just converted an mp3 to a 44100HZ WAV file, and it seems to be working perfectly. I wish I’d known about that a lot sooner. I’ve wasted so much time trying to synchronize text and audio files with little success.
Thanks again.
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@Timmins Thanks for the confirmation. In some cases it could be an issue with audio file coding and re-converting usually helps in those cases.
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Yea, I lost quite a bit of time too, trying everything. Anyway below is from AI, so It might be related to VBR encoded MP3 and low bitrate.
Is a specific bitrate or format best for importing to Lingq?
That would be a good question to ask LingQ.
I am not sure what is optimal or the min best. I’m using as high as possible so long as the file size stays reasonable for me. usually 256-320kbps.
Is a specific bitrate or file format recommended as best for imports?
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If the MP3 is incorrectly encoded, our importer is treating part of the frame as silence. Firefox browser is less tolerant of that. Re-converting the file to MP3 with a different bitrate (256-320 @Hsingh mentioned above should do the job) or converting to M4A should resolve the issue.
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Thanks. I’ll try converting to M4A next time.
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That is good to know, I haven’t tried M4a before, will try that next time I upload something.
I think some of the technical information can be shown on the import dialog (or a link there to an import guideline document). LingQ could also do its own conversion to the best correct format/encoding in the back-end so it doesn’t matter what file user uploads.
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