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).
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.
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?
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)
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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.[/quote]
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…
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(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)[/quote]
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.
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.
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.
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.
AIFFs are also just as huge. I’d use flac if I were in your position, but I also ditched iTunes the last time it pissed me off. Even when I was using iTunes, I still got flac when I could.
It looks like 16/44.1 ALAC files work in TP, so…convert a few and see how that works? I’m not sure, I haven’t seen a problem using mp3s in any DJ application, whereas everything but Live hated wav files the last time I tried them. So, yeah…sorry.
I’m with mostapha here : I used to play ALACs in Traktor 3.x just fine and that was on a windows box with quicktime, before I switched to FLACs and ditched itunes.
If you can make that move, FLAC will do you fine.
The only issues I had/have with it in traktor scratch pro are :
*doesn’t read the year, sometimes removes that tag.
Fix : set the date from traktor as year-month-day. May be due to the type of tags used ( id3 vs ogg tags)
*playback/waveforms begin after a few frames of sound.
Fix : add a little silence with your editor and analyze the track again if you’d already imported it. I don’t know whether 1.2.7 still does this.
I seem to remember there were some limitations wrt. tagging ALAC which tipped the balance towards FLAC, but I can’t comment further on that as it may well have been adressed in Traktor Pro.
I can’t ditch iTunes, unfortunately. I don’t like it, but there are no decent alternatives for OSX (Amarok and Banshee don’t really work, MediaMonkey is Windows only…).
Because of this, I can’t really use Flac. I’ve had too many problems with iTunes losing my Flac tags and generally being painful.
Actually Apple Lossless is one of the most supported lossless standards out there. Its universal across everything and the average compression is lossless yet saves 50-60% of the space the wave would and still is bit accurate if you compare it side by side to a wave straight off the pcm. It also uses the mp4 container(mpeg4 part 14 specifically) and supports a great amount of id3 tag like metadata and you can rip a mix cd as one long alac file and embed the cue sheet in the file so when you load it in the music player it’s in tracks and place perfectly and burns perfectly back to cd.
Works in all the standard system apps like Itunes, Cog, VLC, mplayer, also many music players including ipods, iphones and appletvs play it back without problem. That’s what makes it a big deal to me, I like carrying around my newest tracks on my ipod or droid and listening to them when im out somewhere and make notes, etc. part of the reason its so well supported is because its fully integrated into the libavcodec library(for any of you developers out there) which is pretty standard and a free open source multi codec library for developing apps with.
I’ve done my research, every daw i’ve tried it with supports ALAC, traktor has supported alac since the beginning, serato has supported it as well. even mixed in key suppports it. And if you’re running on the mac platform you really luck out cuz you can use XLD to do your encoding.
You can hate on itunes all day, but its got some great features, you should lookup what’s possible using applescript, and also smart folders. Itunes makes a great music database for any DJ. the ratings transfer over to traktor, if you’re doing things right you’re running everything through mixed in key first so you can sort by key and bpm, make smartfolders, run crazy custom scripts that are so easy a preschooler could write in applescript to manipulate your library and save a ton of time.
all these things plus the fact that everything that the common dj uses integrates with itunes and integrates with the best lossless ever ALAC. (traktor, serato, mixed in key, logic, ableton, you name it.
Also by sorting by key or import date it makes its super easy to burn cd’s if you’re a diehard cdj user not to mention its good practice to have a good set of cds with you in case your laptop borks on you, I’ve never even had the problem before but I know to be prepared if it comes. *cough skrillex.
So all those programs, your ipod, your phone(android, blackberry, iphone, they all work with itunes). It’s nice to have one program that keeps a standard library with quite a bit of metadata built in. I use Description to write in my own shorthand language what the song is like. I wrote an applescript that copies Description to the Lyrics field which is a supported tag in traktor, very handy!
I don’t know about you guys but I wouldn’t want to recreate a new library / colllection/ crate box / whatever the program calls it and then make sure they’re perfectly synced up to each other. let itunes do that for you. the only way I see someone going wrong with itunes is if they’re using a pc cuz itunes runs slow as shit on a pc, because…pcs are slow as shit compared to macs.
and sorry to break the hard reality to the diehard pc users(just know i used to be you for a long time and it wasnt until apple really stepped up to the plate and delivered something to make our lives as musicians that much less stressful that I respected them. theres a reason 99.9% of all the worlds top performers and djs who use computers use mac and its because they’re fast, reliable, they’re designed specifically for ppl who want a very high performance machine that they don’t have to worry about crashing in the middle of their set or that adware popping up from last nights porn session.
Unix doesn’t crash often unless you really ask for it. like install the wrong dodgy kernel extensions for tiger in snow leopard that have been hacked together by random people. lol
they’re made for people who work in music/media/video and want the best. and ALAC is made for people who work with music and want the best compression and the lowest cpu usage to decode it and still remail lossless and within a file container that supports id3 meta information.
BTW waves are dodgy to write meta to. they were never designed for it and some programs only get away with it by embedding their information in the header of the file and alot of programs will end up wiping it out if you run it through them. BTW ALAC supports full HD at 24bit up to 96k, same as my tsp cert dj mixer and both of my sound cards. Everyone asks well when the helll do you run across a 24bit file? um everytime I get a promo from a producer buddy, thats how they come back from the mastering company before they’re downsampled and released to everyone else. Always pays to know good producers
And you know all those bandpages where you get free promos for giving them your email address? alac’s even there. I dare someone to find a better, more supported standard for lossless when it comes to working with music in the industry. To me its either wave or alac and with alac I get a nice mp4 container with metadata.
Yeah the one exception alac doesnt shine its best is with pcs, I always ran something called quicktime lite back when I was using my sony vaio which was a long time ago. quicktime is slow on pcs, just like firefox is slow on macs. but thats to be expected, apple put alot of money into alac so that they could support lossless on their ipods, iphones, ipads, and to send over airtunes. it was the open source community that decoded it from scratch so they could use it too and it just caught on big cuz apple never pursued anyone for licensing it.
Nice to have someone on this forum who knows what they are talking about Joeblack. I can imagine a lot of kids new to the game going crazy reading some of the uninformed rubbish being written now and again. iTunes works very well with tractor. Apple lossless works very well with traktor. Keep it simple!
Apple stuff is cool and all but I’m sure they deliberately design it to be a pain in the ass and hardly work on windows systems. I just light how insanely lightweight and easy to use on every system flac is.
