Now i have to admit since i started mixing with Traktor/Ableton/Cd’s i have never bought a track because i could easily get them elsewhere. But now i have had a change of heart and have completely deleted all of the tracks i have acquired illegally and i am now starting to build up my collection again.
Confession Over…
Now my question:
Beatport charges £1 extra for .wav formats vs the Mp3 format. And i have studied Music technology for 6 years so i know all about the two formats but what i want to ask is is there a noticeable difference in clubs? On big systems?what format do you guys get and why?Also the Tax part, is there always tax on every track or just certain ones?
On a big system i haven’t noticed much if any differences between the two. Obviously wavs are better but unless you have terrabytes of hd space hq mp3’s are all good imo. As far as getting wavs off beatport goes, as far as i know the extra charge is pretty standard mate.
can’t tell a difference. i guess if you sit in the best spot in club, alone, play mp3 and wav of the same track you could tell a small difference, but never spotted any difference during a gig.
and i never play mp3s below 320 just to be sure is it really safe to play 256? i hear different opinions on this one quite often..
If you’ve got the spare cash and hard disk space, just get wavs and FLAC’em up - stays lossless and takes around half the size You can add classic ID3 tags to these, not too sure how well tpro handles ogg tags which are recommended for flacs.
Now, why ?
That way you can do your own edits from a cleaner base, if that’s something you like to do - you want a different remix, you want to remaster somehow, the track speeds up and you want to warp it in ableton for a clean beatgrid in traktor…
Also, you can always burn them to audio cds that will play in any deck and which you can re-rip into a perfect quality should you lose your digital files - double backup (for gigs/for your collection’s safety ).
How it sounds in a club isn’t my primary concern when it comes to buying music. My main concern is - I’m paying for this legally, so I want the actual original song - that is to say, I want the lossless.
I’d feel bad pirating a lossless versus pirating a lossy format (even a 320).
another consideration if you use Ableton…and i hope I get this right, but my understanding is that Live prefers to play in WAV format, so if you ask it to play an MP3, it does a real time conversion to WAV while the file plays…which eats resources. I’ve read that you save quite a bit of processing power by playing actual WAVs in Ableton.
Behind the scenes knowledge about beat port, a friend of mine who runs his own label and deals with beatport told me that their wav formats are nothing more then the 320kpbs mp3 converted or something along those lines.
quirky note on that he got pissed off at them and now refuses to release through them.
Would be interesting to have more insider takes on this. There are other stores carrying wav downloads, but I don’t think too many have such a comprehensive library as bp…
is it really safe to play 256? i hear different opinions on this one quite often..