Preferred lossless format for Traktor?

[willrjmarshall]

Hi guys,

I am switching over to Traktor from Ableton (on a Mac). I have a bunch of music in WAV (CD rips, Beatport, etc). I am using iTunes to curate all my music, and am connecting using the iTunes integration with Traktor.

I've noticed Traktor doesn't write tags back to WAVs, so I'm wondering: what is the ideal lossless format for using with iTunes and Traktor on OSX?

My options seem to be WAV, Apple Lossless, AIFF and Flac (but iTunes has poor FLAC support).

Any suggestions/wisdom?

[kiss-o-matic]

I've noticed Traktor doesn't write tags back to WAVs, so I'm wondering: what is the ideal lossless format for using with iTunes and Traktor on OSX?

It writes at least the beat grid and the wave form... maybe even the track/title/artist info but I can't remember... seems it wouldn't need them in the collection.nml file that way, but there they are. I know I should know though. I'm lazy. Sue me.

I've read all over the interwebs that writing tags in a WAV file is a bad thing to do, but nobody here or any other DJ forum seems to cry foul.

Anyway, I use WAV, and it's fine. Traktor doesn't support Apple Lossless from what I remember, and FLAC, if I'm not mistaken, just got fixed. Since few places sell FLAC and or Apple Lossless, seems you'd be going through a lot of work to encode them and find one that both support. Just stick with WAV.

[willrjmarshall]

It writes the information inside the Traktor library, but not back to iTunes like with MP3s, or into the ID3 tag.

This means that if I copy my music collection to a new computer (I DJ off SD cards sometimes) I lose all my beatgridding and so on!

[kiss-o-matic]

It writes the information inside the Traktor library, but not back to iTunes like with MP3s, or into the ID3 tag.

That's only some tags. Not all.

This means that if I copy my music collection to a new computer (I DJ off SD cards sometimes) I lose all my beatgridding and so on!

Beatgridding you will definitely keep. There was a thread about it here just last week. And if you want to switch computers, just use the same collection.nml file, no?

[willrjmarshall]

Sweet. If the beatgridding stays it's not a problem. I had thought that the beatgridding data is stored in the file.

I can't necessarily transfer the collection file. I play on friend's computers, and I doubt they'd like me messing with their collection.

(It's trivial for me to hack together a script that find all my WAVs in iTunes and encodes them to another format, so don't worry about the effort there)

[kiss-o-matic]

I can't necessarily transfer the collection file. I play on friend's computers, and I doubt they'd like me messing with their collection.

Totally follow. A nice tool would be an external application that swaps the collection file around before starting. Would be even better if NI made it configurable, but hey...

(It's trivial for me to hack together a script that find all my WAVs in iTunes and encodes them to another format, so don't worry about the effort there)

Indeed, but I've always found it better to keep everything in a friendly format, and focus on tinkering in other places... but, to each their own, of course.

[MrPopinjay]

If you're using wavs I see no reason not to encode them into flacs and free up some disk space.

[willrjmarshall]

Gotcha. I'm basically interested in finding the best/format workflow to minimise effort in the long run, but if there are no formats that are clearly better than WAV...

Does AIFF have any advantages? It's a slightly friendlier format than WAV in some ways, but I'm not necessarily sold on it.

[kiss-o-matic]

If you're using wavs I see no reason not to encode them into flacs and free up some disk space.

My options seem to be WAV, Apple Lossless, AIFF and Flac (but iTunes has poor FLAC support).

WAV and MP3 are defacto. You're rarely going to find a serious music application that doesn't have good support for both. The rest are almost always going to be iffy. Not sure how iTunes AIFF support is... then again, I hate iTunes like cancer.

[MrPopinjay]

Well he's using traktor and that works perfectly with flac so there's no issues there. flac is also a lossless format so it doesn't matter if you decide later to convert back to wav, the quality won't suffer.