MP's for TV broadcast
 

Does anyone have any experience using MP3's for TV broadcast use? I have some great royalty free music and SFX in MP3 format. Most of them are 44Khz 16-bit. I was hoping to convert them to 48Khz AIFF in Quicktime Pro to use in FCP. I plan to export via firewire and dub into Betacam for some short segments for broadcast on a local TV station.

Any comments about this? I know that technically, MP3's are highly compresseed and upsampling it and converting it to AIFF merely changes the "wrapper" but I'm on an ultra tight budget and was hoping to make use of what I have instead of shelling out money for an audio-lay-in after my final edit at an audio post facility.

Thanks!

I am certainly no expert in this field, but I suspect that you will find that this method will introduce artifacts that will render your final product unacceptable for broadcast. I have found that using a similiar method for converting 44.1 Khz to 48khz sounds good on a normal tv speaker, but you will hear audible clicks on a home theatre system. Luckily for me the production music that I wanted to use was originally recorded in an analog format so my options are open.

It mostly depends on what bitrate those MP3's are.... But they
will never be the same quality as an uncompressed or lossless
compressed file (like PCM). I think I would go with at least
192 kbit. 256 or 320 is much better. What bitrate are they?

As a test, you might want to try taking a CD you do own and play it over a nice sound system and then compare it to an MP3 played over the same set up to see if the difference is noticeable. Choose songs that have a similar profile to the MP3s and SFX you want to use, meaning, if they have lots of bass, use a song with lots of bass. If your music and SFX have lots of sharp highs or deep lows, you'll notice more loss than a flatter piece of audio. As others have said, the higher the bitrate the better. And the encoder actually can make a big difference as well.