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Thread: WAV or MP3 for Bedroom / Clubs (No massive venues)

  1. #1
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    WAV or MP3 for Bedroom / Clubs (No massive venues)

    Hi guys, need some advise please, and I do understand this has most probably been talked about on every forum

    I use Beatport for all my Digital tracks and they recently had their 10%/25% then 50% discount offer on, I am receiving my 50% off code tomorrow which will be available for around 5 days I think.

    I'm going to make full use of this code and have about 180 Tracks sitting my basket

    I was a DJ previously in the 90's and now getting back into it but rather rusty, I was playing the sort of house/Dance music, Hooj Choons/Patrick Prins sort of mixes etc, but now wildly into Prog House/Melodic Techno

    Now I will only be starting off again mixing in my Bedroom, hopefully making my way back into Clubs later, once all the experience has picked back up again

    Would I be best purchasing the Tracks in MP3 format or WAV? Would anyone really notice the difference in a club?

    All help would be highly appreciated on this as it's driving me up the wall as Google is very 50 / 50

    Thanks

  2. #2
    Member BDC's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Leebroath View Post
    Would I be best purchasing the Tracks in MP3 format or WAV? Would anyone really notice the difference in a club?
    I will always recommend the WAV file. Keep in mind MP3 files (even at 320 kbps) are compressed while WAV files are lossless (sound reproduction of original file resulting in no loss of data).
    And regarding your second question -- probably not. For 95% of the audience - compressed audio at 320 kbps in a club - will be imperceptible.
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  3. #3
    If you do buy uncompressed, buy AIFF and not WAV. Same audio, but AIFF supports tagging whereas WAV gives you no tags (which is super annoying).
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    Moderator DJ Bobcat's Avatar
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    WAV or MP3 for Bedroom / Clubs (No massive venues)

    I’ll just make a simple suggestion. Rip some songs from a CD to .WAV files (or another lossless format). Then rip the same songs from the same CD to a 320 bit MP3 files and have someone else play the same songs from the CD, WAV, and MP3 in random order and see if you can identify which is which. In order to do this test scientifically, you need to do it with at least 10 songs. Record the results. I can almost guarantee you that you’ll only be able to identify the right format about 50% of the time. I did this test with a friend who said he could tell the difference EVERY time, but guess what???... he was wrong. Most people can’t hear the difference with headphones... How many will be able to hear the difference in a noisy club or party???

  5. #5
    Deez Beats! KLH's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Ryan Ruel View Post
    If you do buy uncompressed, buy AIFF and not WAV. Same audio, but AIFF supports tagging whereas WAV gives you no tags (which is super annoying).
    FLAC if possible. AIFF if not. WAV if that's all you can do. MP3 is kinda last resort at this point.

    Keep in mind that I'm just talking encoding formats. If you don't have a great source to begin with, your format really doesn't matter.
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  6. #6
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    WAV.

    (Or aiff, or flac etc).

    The difference between a well encoded 320kbs MP3 and a lossless file may be negligible but why would you want to lose anything you don't have to.

    Also, I think when you adjuste volume, mixed, eq and add effects to an already compressed file, it can make a bigger difference.

    That's counter-intuitive I know but think about an image.. if you start off with a slightly lower resolution image, and then stretch/distort it etc, you will end up with a lesser result than if you start off with a high resolution one.

  7. #7
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    Sound Gym is an ear training website (it only has a few free games you have join for the others). It has thousands of members worldwide, members who specialise in music production, recording, live sound etc (otherwise why would one join!!!). The games rely heavily on telling the difference between the same sounds, especially the Reverb game, Compression game and Distortion game, at first they're easy but when you get in the top tier % it gets very very hard, the differences are next to nothing. It ranks you in comparison to other users... I'm in the top 5%, some games higher, 95.1% better than other users over all, 98.32% Reverb Wizard, 98.84 Bass Detective... Not bragging, it's relevant... I still can't accurately hear the difference between mp3 320 and wav. This is on Pro Studio monitors too.

    The argument about manipulating the audio is a good one but if a 320 is all I have, I wouldn't care too much about it.
    Last edited by mitchiemasha; 10-12-2019 at 06:33 AM.

  8. #8
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    House and techno ok the mp3 320 format, trance, vocal trance, classical need maximal quality.
    If you used CD-players need wav format.
    I'm used CD and mp3 DJ players... CD players working correctly, mp3 players not precise: no real dinamic, VBR quality: wrong time, not fix tempo.

    mp3 files problem:
    -more silence or crackle in file start
    -ID3V2 (plus special characters) not supported more players
    -more tracks JOINT STEREO
    -more file overdrived (clipped)

    CD without problem:
    -no additional silence or crackle in track start
    -CD-Text widely supported
    -full stereo
    -CD writer softwares support clipped peak restoration, normalization

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