MP3 or Wav from Beatport?

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

MP3 or Wav from Beatport?

I’m interested to hear some opinions on what format I should be downloading when I purchase from beatport. Wav or MP3. I love the compactness of the MP3 format but as far as sound quality goes, hard to beat the Wav format. Calling all digital DJs. Are you spinning with MP3s in Traktor or Wav format files?

I’m tempted to purchase the Wav format and then convert to MP3 using my DAW. Best of both worlds, or am I missing something here? Thanks.

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I use the 320kbps mp3 tracks. IMO this is a good enough quality to use even at clubs.

Wrong - you cannot get the best from 2 worlds by converting a wav file to mp3. In short terms, the conversion lowers the quality, therefor the smaller file size.

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Thanks. By best of both worlds, I meant that by buying wav and converting a copy to mp3, you would have the higher quality wav version plus the more compact mp3 version on your hard drive.

Update, The Beatport wav file “handling” fee doubled the cost of my purchase over just buying the mp3 version. Mp3 it is. Economics triumphs over high fidelity.

4

Other others are right. MP3 is the way to go over WAV.

One other tip though, I like to pick FLAC over MP3 when available. It’s got an even better sound quality… more like WAV with a nice low-end, but with the file sizes of MP3. It also works fine in Traktor :slight_smile:

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FLAC uses lossless compression - so infact its the exact same quality as the wav file it was created from

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wav have more sound quility than mp3 thats just my opinion

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Arhh ok. Yeah in that way you get the best of both worlds :slight_smile:

I will also choose FLAC any day, but they a hard to come by

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you could always convert the wav files you download to FLAC yourself

9

Yeah ok, thats a possibility. But as Dizzy said, Wav normally costs more

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Yeah, Wav basically doubled the price of the download. So I went with MP3. No FLAC version available unfortunately.

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Ive noticed the rip scene is slowly adopting FLAC - i think its a good move personally given how cheap and vast hard drive space is nowadays.

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I used to use mp3 but had a retro moment and got out a couple of records and mixed them. There was just more going on, for eg I never quite get the phasing of the kick drum sound in Traktor.

So when you also consider …

WAV is the one for me.