Preferred file type - lossy or lossless?

[Atomisk]

Poll says it all, what is your preferred file type? I personally prefer flac but I have some wav or mp3/m4a from iTunes for pop stuff.

[FaderCrusader]

I stick with MP3 mostly to save space, I don't think I'm ever playing on systems good enough that lossless would make a difference anyway.

[Sween]

As a mobile guy with over 36,000 tracks on my MBP who refuses to plug in an external drive... all MP3. About half are 192 VBR... but I rip everything nowadays at 320 VBR.

When I make my own tracks on Live I keep them lossless.

[drzinc]

flac is what i rip to. Unfortunately no service offers flac.

[Nick Bike]

mp3s for djing, wavs/aiff for actual productions.

[LeFresh]

mp3s for djing, wavs/aiff for actual productions.

yeeeeee

[Jason Cerna]

mp3s for djing, wavs/aiff for actual productions.

this ^^^

[login]

mp3 for djing, but only at 320 kbps.

[moyo wilde]

320 mp3, wav is just too big can't fit enough songs on a cd and they take up too much space on a hard drive. i also don't like using an external to dj.

[l0ckd0wn]

320mp3.

[g-sep]

320mp3

Sent from my PG86100 using Tapatalk

[Sean]

For sure MP3 for djing (at 320), and wav if I'm making edits etc.

[Phil Noize]

320mp3 (and some m4a) for DJing, wav or flac for anything else.

[Ocie]

mostly 320 mp3. the occasional m4a top 40 song that i bought from itunes.

[RDRCK]

Vinyl for DJing, Vinyl for actual production :P

[Tektonix]

MP3 Please and thank you C: Anything else is to hard to find or to fucking big for us thumb drive guys

[Andrew B]

320kbps mp3 and 256kbps AAC

[mostapha]

Uncompressed. Slightly prefer aiff because it stores metadata, but I don't care because converting between them is trivial.

mp3s are for wusses and AAC is for the music from iTunes that I want to listen to in the car and basically nowhere else. If iTunes offered alac, aiff, or wav, I'd pay to upgrade everything. Actually…it might now, I should check on that.

[drzinc]

Most dj's forget how good real cd's sound in this age of mp3's. I love flac for dj duties and also for archiving I also hvae it in my music server that feeds the house. But alas the most popular dj program does not do flac fortunately my program of choice will play any audio file out there.

[Chris F]

I prefer uncompressed.

Note that m4a is actually the mp4 container containing either AAC or ALAC codec hence it can be either lossy or lossless.

Apologies for being pedantic, just want to educate.

[Quentin Legend]

MP3 @ 320kbps for DJ'ing (Lossless uses way too much space).

[KLH]

MP3 @320kbps for DJing assuming that the file is made from the highest quality source...

Encoding rate alone does NOT mean that the file is high quality. No, I'm not opening this up to discussion. I'm just pointing out the obvious.

-KLH

[Original]

320 mp3 from beatport. It's the perfect mix of price, size and sound quality!

[Leftylyf]

Mostly 320's with some m4a's.

[k4hn]

In a perfect world my whole library would be flac, but sometimes you just can't get things in lossless. One of the major reasons I went from Itch to Traktor was because Traktor supported flac. (This was about 1 year ago, so correct me if Itch now supports flac).

The people voting for wavs don't make much sense when you can do flac at a smaller sized file (unless for compatibility issues, like mentioned above.)

[mostapha]

Exactly…everything plays wav and aiff. And, seriously, hard drive space is cheap. You can fit 10,000 songs on a $15 USB key if you shop around, assuming 150MB wav files. My Archive drive is 3TB (it's new :)) and it cost less than my first 80GB hard drive however long ago that was.

Disk space is cheap. I just don't see the point of mp3 compression unless you're streaming stuff over the internet.

And, well, that's really just providers (like mixcloud and soundcloud) not wanting to pay for bandwidth where that matters.

Netflix's HD streams are compressed to all hell (usually, the compression artifacts are visible and distracting, in my experience) but they're still huge compared to the size of music files. And they figured out how to stream all that crap to people for $8/month/user and still make money.

Even if you can't hear the difference and the sound systems you play on now can't show it, why not just get better files now instead of potentially having to upgrade your archive (read: re-purchase any classics or already-owned tracks you want to play) when/if you play somewhere with a good sound system or accidentally teach yourself to hear the difference?

[Nick Bike]

Exactly…everything plays wav and aiff. And, seriously, hard drive space is cheap. You can fit 10,000 songs on a $15 USB key if you shop around, assuming 150MB wav files. My Archive drive is 3TB (it's new :)) and it cost less than my first 80GB hard drive however long ago that was.

Disk space is cheap. I just don't see the point of mp3 compression unless you're streaming stuff over the internet.

And, well, that's really just providers (like mixcloud and soundcloud) not wanting to pay for bandwidth where that matters.

Netflix's HD streams are compressed to all hell (usually, the compression artifacts are visible and distracting, in my experience) but they're still huge compared to the size of music files. And they figured out how to stream all that crap to people for $8/month/user and still make money.

Even if you can't hear the difference and the sound systems you play on now can't show it, why not just get better files now instead of potentially having to upgrade your archive (read: re-purchase any classics or already-owned tracks you want to play) when/if you play somewhere with a good sound system or accidentally teach yourself to hear the difference?

mostly because over half the people i know that use external drives while DJing have problems on and off the stage. i have no desire to haul around a separate HD.

[mostapha]

So, don't. Never have, never will.

I really don't understand how so many people have problems with storage. I use a 120GB SSD. Before that, I used a 64GB SSD.

It's really not that complicated to just not waste disk space on crap.

[greenlight]

Exactly…everything plays wav and aiff. And, seriously, hard drive space is cheap. You can fit 10,000 songs on a $15 USB key if you shop around, assuming 150MB wav files.

I think you got your sums wrong; assuming you're talking about a 16GB USB key, you'd get approx 100 songs on there, not 10,000.

I buy and recommend people buy lossless, but file size is still a minor inconvenience in some situations.

Compared to the inconvenience of a box of vinyl it's insignificant though so I think if you love music it's worth the effort!

[peterwo2e]

for mobile mp3 all the way. your back will thank you later,

[Sigma]

I rip CDs and vinyl to FLAC files. I only use MP3 for putting mixes out on the web.

I don't think lack of hard drive space alone is a good excuse for not using lossless formats, cos you can get internal laptop drives that are 1TB in size now.

Even if you have a pretty small 250GB drive, let's say you have 50GB for the OS and your DJing apps, that 200GB of space that's left is enough for 3,000 7 minute long songs in WAV format and up to double that if you go with lossless compression. Obviously, a lot of songs are shorter than 7 minutes too.

[fueledbymusic]

I use MP3 and WMA. I hardly hear the difference between the lossless and those MP3 and WMAs. Even 128kbs MP3s sound good to me. Although I never record less than 240kbs, there is one or two songs I have in 128s

[DJNR]

I try to use WAVs for production, but I am finding myself DJing WAV files also because I slimmed down on my collection quite a bit.

I guess it's pretty arbitrary for me :P

[Brom]

Exactly…everything plays wav and aiff. And, seriously, hard drive space is cheap. ...

Even if you can't hear the difference and the sound systems you play on now can't show it, why not just get better files now instead of potentially having to upgrade your archive (read: re-purchase any classics or already-owned tracks you want to play) when/if you play somewhere with a good sound system or accidentally teach yourself to hear the difference?

+1000. Somehow I had the foresight in early 2006 when I ripped my collection to do them as full-size AIFFs. My laptop drive couldn't fit them all so I converted the AIFFs to 192k AAC to fit them on the drive. And any disc I bought from them on out was ripped to AIFF and down-converted. Then last year I got a new MBP and put in a 1TB drive and pulled out my external with all the AIFFs so now that's what I DJ with in Traktor.

[bumpyjonas]

Mp3 at 320 some at 256 and 192.