WAV vs. MP3

clubfoot · Post by **clubfoot** » Sat Jul 29, 2006 10:52 pm

Not wanting to start a war of formats or anything. I was just wondering from a DJ perspective how people rate 320kbps mp3 files against wav.

I'm looking to download a few tracks from beatport and put some disks together to supplement my vinyl - I don't know if I should start building my collection up as wav or if i could suffice with mp3. I've only ever Dj'd with vinyl, never CD, so I'm not really familiar with CDJs and other common CD decks you find in clubs. So what does everyone else use?

Any tips from experience would sure be appreciated.

jspr · Post by **jspr** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 12:10 am

In my opinion, approx 85% of the party people is either drunk or wasted on the dancefloor so they probably don't hear it that good, they would dance anyway.

I use for Final Scratch only MP3's higher than 160Kbps.
Most of my downloaded tracks are 192kbps, 256kbps or 320kbps. Sometimes when I finally found a "hard to find" track and it's not available in a higher bitrate I will play it on 160kbps, but i'd rather not.
Tracks I recorded myself are always 320kbps.

SB1 · Post by **SB1** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 12:49 am

kiwi wrote:In my opinion, approx 85% of the party people is either drunk or wasted on the dancefloor so they probably don't hear it that good, they would dance anyway.

I use for Final Scratch only MP3's higher than 160Kbps.
Most of my downloaded tracks are 192kbps, 256kbps or 320kbps. Sometimes when I finally found a "hard to find" track and it's not available in a higher bitrate I will play it on 160kbps, but i'd rather not.
Tracks I recorded myself are always 320kbps.

Same here

Robot Criminal · Post by **Robot Criminal** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 1:15 am

under 192 kbps is not an option.

but if ur up for quality then i'd rather go for a wav or flac or aiff
(mp3 still means lossy compression)

DanielCarew · Post by **DanielCarew** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 5:26 am

Yeah, I agree less than 192mp3 is no good, but I don't think wav is totally necessary. The difference in storge you need is going to be huge. And personally, I can't hear a difference between my own tracks in wav format and mp3 @ 192 & >.

theclockstrucktwelve · Sun Jul 30, 2006 5:25 pm

DanielCarew wrote:Yeah, I agree less than 192mp3 is no good, but I don't think wav is totally necessary. The difference in storge you need is going to be huge. And personally, I can't hear a difference between my own tracks in wav format and mp3 @ 192 & >.

192 is garbage. I wouldn't go lower than 256

plaster · Post by **plaster** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 6:50 pm

theclockstrucktwelve wrote:
192 is garbage. I wouldn't go lower than 256

meaning...every time you go in a club, you take your spectrogram and analise? you won't hear any difference, trust me.

brianc · Post by **brianc** » Mon Jul 31, 2006 6:41 am

consider this...

encode them with FLAC. it usually does a good job with compression, and it's lossless, so you can always convert them to wave files, which you can then encode at whichever bitrate you like at that point in time.