Hi,
I don't know about Magix Audio Clinic Lab (ACL) but I assume
it's a kind of wave editor program (I use Cool Edit Pro).
One thing is when you want to clean some recording to remove clicks'n pops
or to trim the tracks you should always do this on the original waveform.
To do that with MJ you should first Rip to an uncompressed format
(set the encoder option to Uncompressed wave is safer). You'll get a large .wav
file that you can load in your wave cleaning software.
When your work is done in ACL you should be able to use a "Save as..." command and
choose the encoding format you like (WMA, MP3...).
If you can't save in MP3 from within ACL it probably means that you need some sort
of encoding plugin (same for Cool Edit). In that case don't worry save your work in
.wav format and use MJ to encode to MP3.
(Import your .wav in MJ and select Tools/Convert Format)
>>how can I set up MJ so that it imports my tunes as MP3 files and not WMA files?
MJ will import your tunes in the format they are encoded. You can't import a .wma file
as an .mp3 file. What you can do is to convert from one format to another (transcode).
It is perfectly possible to convert a wma file to an mp3 file with MJ but this will result
in a loss of quality so this is not advisable.
In short converting between lossy formats is dangerous but converting from a loseless
format to a lossy one will alway be ok. That's why I started by saying that you should do your
wave cleaning on plain wave file (.wav is a loseless/uncompressed format)
A short taxonomy of music file formats :
Uncompressed/loseless(of course !
) : Wave (.wav) Raw (.raw)
Compressed/loseless : APE (.ape, .apl)
Compressed/lossy : MP3 (.mp3), WMA (.wma), Musepack (.mpc), Ogg/vorbis (.ogg)
Now about tags: I think, but this would require a test, that MJ convert tool also
copy the file properties at least for the basic ones (artist, genre, etc..)
Voila, hope all this is not too confusing !
Have fun !