Same losslessness, same professional-quality sound and the same limitations. Thus if you decide you can’t live with 320kbps MP3s and want to use WAVE files exclusively, you’re going to have to be very organised with your music to survive without metadata.īasically Apple’s WAVE (.wav is actually a Microsoft format). These files don’t usually have any room for metadata though, and although a version of WAVE exists called Broadcast Wave (BWF) that allows metadata to be added, to my knowledge this isn’t picked up by any DJ software. Results are excellent and some DJs swear by only using. wav extension, this is the most widely accepted – indeed, pretty universal – lossless, uncompressed format. You may also come across OGG (or OGG Vorbis), but this is very uncommon for audio files. If for some reason you’re using Windows Media Player to organise your music, you can tell it to use MP3 instead, which is what I recommend you do. Microsoft’s proprietary Windows Media Player format (WMA) often has compatibility issues with players. DJ software supports them, but there’s no good reason to use them if you can avoid it they’re never going to win the battle with MP3 and it’s just one extra format to have in your collection.īasically WMA and OGG. m4a, and you’ll see it if you buy from the iTunes store, for instance.īecause AAC does better at lower bitrates than MP3, to my ears 256kbps AAC files sound as good as 320kbps MP3s, so that’s a good rule of thumb if you want to use AAC files. It is the native lossy format of Apple’s iTunes, iPod, iPad etc. When you’re ripping CDs you can specify the bitrate (more below), and you can buy 320kbps MP3s from web stores too.ĪAC, or Advanced Audio Coding, is a relative of MP3 – only newer, and supposedly better. Personally, depending on the source material, I occasionally play at 192kbps, but never any lower. MP3s at 320kbps are generally accepted as pretty indistinguishable from CD sound quality, 256kbps isn’t far off. Others are happy to, enjoying the convenience of their size, the fact that they have great metadata (album art, file information etc), and the fact that they’re easily the most popular format. Some DJs refuse to use MP3s at all, saying even the best of them sound bad compared to lossless audio. The MP3 is easily the most widespread of the lossy formats. avi video files and codecs can tell you! With audio, you don’t really need to know about this but if you’re interested, there a lot of dry depth on this Wikipedia page). (By the way, there’s a distinction to be drawn between “containers” and “formats”, as anyone who’s ever dabble with. The trade-off with these is that they take up much more room and are also harder to move around because of their size. Uncompressed lossless files are simply straight recordings of the original, with nothing done to them. Compressed lossless audio has had inaudible changes made to reduce file size – they’re typically not as small as lossy files, but the changes are enough to make a big difference to size nonetheless. These files come in two types – compressed and uncompressed. Lossless, meanwhile, is audio recorded without any musical data removed. ![]() This means that the audio you play has got bits missing from it, due to having been altered to make the file smaller. The algorithms that lossy formats use try and remove parts of the music where it doesn’t matter so much – but the smaller the file is compressed to with these formats, the more trashed it becomes. Lossy audio is easily the most common of the types, basically because the ubiquitous MP3 is “lossy”. ![]() ![]() Let’s look a little closer… Lossless vs lossy audio ![]() With news this week that Apple wants to make “24-bit” files available through iTunes, we thought it would be a good time to revisit the music formats that are out there and look at what they mean for digital DJs.Īs a digital DJ, it pays to know your audio formats: Not only should you be aware of the different audio formats that exist, so you recognise them when you come across them, but also you should know when the use of each of the formats is appropriate and when it is to be avoided.
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