I was djing at a small party that a friend of mine puts on every once in a while and a friend of his came up to me asking if I used flac’s instead of mp3’s and the like. I told him no, I’m not very experienced, I’ve only been doing this a couple months, and he gave me some input on why I should convert the music I play to flacs. I’m just curious to see if any of you out there do the same. I’ve made attempts to convert quantities of files, but the sound quality doesn’t sound all that much better coming out of my speakers anyways (noticeable, but not very). I figure that if I ever got into actual gigging rather than entertaining drunk college kids at a party I would take his word more seriously. As for now, I’m sticking with some space on my hard drive and sticking with whatever files I download.
Once again, to reiterate, do you guys use flac files for the music that you play?
It doesn’t help if you convert FROM mp3 TO flac. Flac is a “lossless” storage version of audio. So if you went from .wav to .flac, it would keep the file integrity, and bring it down to a smaller size for storage.
Personally I think Mp3’s are fine, and I like to stick with what is easier to get. I keep my collection at 320 kbps Mp3’s, and that’s fine. If I ever wanted to go FLAC, I’m sure I’d want all my music in that format, so that’s where I’d head. I just don’t think it’s worth the extra cost/hassle.
Yup, converting your lossy compressed mp3 files to .flac will just preserve their lossy sound. You can’t add magically add the information that has been lost.
Well I’m a noob to djing but I always had this question whether the sound difference of FLAC and mp3 320kbs was anyway noticeable on like a huge speaker system
It’s not something you can hear, but I’ve noticed that on TRULY good systems, you can FEEL the difference.
That being said, I’ve only seen a few truly good sound-systems setup at huge festivals, and the chance of myself ever playing on one of those is realistically small. So I am fine with Mp3’s, which most people use anyhow. If I ever started producing and getting anywhere with it though, it might be worth making the full change.
The sound difference will be noticeable if you have a genuine FLAC file (not upconverted). But if you converted from mp3 to FLAC then no you won’t have any sound quality difference because as everyone else pointed out, you can’t restore information that has been lost to compression. So yeah flac would be great if you start out with flac or wavs or CDs, but if you are starting with mp3s you should stay with them. Of course you can make all future music purchases in FLAC or WAV if you choose to go that way.
Personally I’m ok with mp3s at 320kbps and that’s the format I buy stuff in when I buy digital. Mp3 is easier to deal with for a lot of reasons – it’s smaller files, it’s easier to tag and keep track of, and it’s recognized by every player software I’ve ever seen. FLAC is a pain if you use Apple and iTunes and apparently Traktor even has some problems with it. If I were truly an audiophile badass I would buy CDs and vinyl only, rip to FLAC, keep my FLAC files on a couple redundant backup hard drives, and rip parts of my collection to 320 mp3 for “everyday” use. And they’d all be well organized in folders and well-tagged and the vinyl would be alphabetized by genre… But I don’t have time or energy for all that and 320 mp3s are perfectly acceptable even on big funktion one speaker systems. Yes you’ll definitely hear a difference if you listen to the same song in FLAC side by side with mp3, but you wouldn’t do that in most DJ situations.
nope, not anymore. NI fixed the bug about 1 1/2 years after I submitted it. (i submitted the flac bug on 11/27/09 and it was fixed in 2.0.3 which was released in late June '11. ofc, possibly it was a known bug even longer in case somebody filed a bug report before me–idk.)
It is: basically there’s no extra cost. FLAC is free. MP3 is not. You also pay for decoding from psychoacustic compression to PCM: cpu load and loss of signal integrity. MP3@320kb/s is fine, but it’s not lossless. FLAC is.
Finally you can always create MP3 (or AAC, OGG, WMA, punch-cards…) from FLAC in any quality you like - you still have the FLAC files in perfect quality. You can even synchronize cue marks and tags from DJing software that runs MP3s back to your flac library, as FLAC supports any metadata that MP3 provides.
MP3 technically was the only way to store digitalized music when hard disks were 4-12GB large and the only alternatives were magnetic tapes or floppy disks. Nowadays it’s only a matter of compatibility mostly with portable devices. But for archiving (or your general music collection) nothing beats FLAC.
FLACS/WAVs generally cost more from most e-tailers.
I thought about going FLAC but it’s a pain in iTunes. Maybe I’ll use Apple lossless; The good thing about lossless is that you can convert them from one to the other. The only bad thing is that I’d lose the cue points and grids in Traktor.
Wav=>flac as much as I can. It’s still cheaper than vinyl but i’ll shop from whatpeopleplay as much as possible instead of beatport to keep costs low.
-If a file needs some slight editing or even warping in Live, it’ll be degraded less.
-I don’t like the idea of encoding mp3s of mp3s when recording mixes and posting them online.
-If I’m ripping a vinyl, it’ll be archived straight to 44k/16bit flac which is good enough for me.
-I don’t buy a hundred tunes every month, so storage is not an issue.
not worth the hassle and space over 320 imo. you might hear it a little on a huge system if youre really looking for it. side by side it’s hard to tell the difference on most systems
I can hear the difference on my studio monitors on some really well produced music.. like acoustic or classical genres… and as others have said, some huge systems render these differences as well… however, the sad reality is that those systems are few and far between. But even if every system you play on is super high fidelity most EDM or club geared tunes these days are over processed and over compressed (loudness) anyway… so the differences between a 320 and a FLAC are negligible.
Punters can’t tell… Audiophiles don’t know how to have a good time so why would I care what they think?
That guy who came up to you to talk about flacs should have been raving, the fact he was talking to you about flacs shows what a douchebag he is… sorry if he’s your mate and that
I dunno about raving at a small party, if it’s like a house party kind of thing nowadays most of the focus is getting drunk and getting laid, and if you’re not working on those two, might as well talk shop.
If someone can tell the difference between lossless(pure audio, ex. FLAC,WAV,AIFF etc) and mp3 320kbit I would be amazed. There is such a small difference actually, I think it’s in peoples minds..
Sure a vinylrecord sounds different but a new digital dance song will not be dramatically changed if lossless or 320kbit I swear. Where you can truly notice is on real hi-fi systems playing acoustic music or vocals that NOT have been mastered with alot of distortion(don’t know why its so popular today, in the 80s 90s audio engineers busted their ass off to get the distortion away - nowadays they use it as a cool effect because some peoples voices just suck to listen to without it cough Rihanna cough.
To sum it up, it will require some incredible ear to tell whether a song is 320kbit nicely encoded mp3 or in a lossless format.
When speaking id also like to add that 24bit/96khz on the soundcard or 32bit/196khz doesnt matter!
Hell, most of your musicfiles will not be higher quality than 16bit 44100hz(CD quality).
Can anyone tell me why it’s so important with that specs on your soundcard when almost none files are encoded that good?!
forgot to mention that it’s very important that the mp3 file is encoded well (ex. VBR 320kbit)
If its a 192kbit you will for sure hear difference, and if it’s the lowest(128kbit) compared to 320kbit it’s light ages of difference on a decent system.
