Hey all! I have decided to stop buying MP3’s and go strictly lossless in my music files.
My question for you all is should I go WAV or AIFF? I know WAV is the standard in like 9/10 applications, but DJ’ing on a Mac I’ve heard that AIFF is better. I buy from mainly BeatPort and Traxsource both of which sell WAV’s, but only BeatPort sells AIFF’s which makes me lean toward WAV’s again.
Also, when you upgrade your BeatPort buys you can only get AIFF’s. If I decided to go with WAV’s, what is a good free/cheap batch file converter for AIFF–>WAV for Macs? And if I chose to go AIFF will the same application do WAV–>AIFF?
If you want to use lossless for DJing just because you think it’s better quality, don’t. There won’t be any noticeable difference when you play out, it’ll just take more space.
Just wondering, is lossless more expensive? I’ve never bought a track which wasn’t 320kbps.
Only benefit I know of is that AIFF supports tagging, other than that they are pretty much the same.
You can use iTunes, Finder (select a bunch of files, right click, encode selected elements) or make a simple script with automator, no need to buy anything.
@DISaS73R yes, prices vary between sites but you pay a bit more per track when you buy lossless.
Well, lucky you then . I know there is no standardisation over WAV tagging so they tend to be problematic in this aspect, other than that you should be good with any of them.
IF i even buy from beatport anymore (Record Pools are the only way to go I think) I get Lossless wavs, and then convert to FLAC for tagging compatibility.
You can use a compression setting of 10 and lose not bitrate quality from lossless wav. Regardless, its compressed, its not downsampled in any way. Supporting FLAC means the application supports the decompression essentially.
FLAC can be converted back and forth from wav to flac without loss of quality etc.
Which is what you do in programs like Traktor and Ableton, i’m a big supporter of Lossless.
AIFF for me, although i do buy in FLAC, problem is iTunes can’t handle it, thus Traktor DJ can’t handle it, so I have re-encoded all my tracks into AIFF.
If you’re creating permanent samples e.g. for the Remix Decks it might make sense to use lossless. But as Traktor does not reencode the files you use for general mixing, it doesn’t come under the same use-case as actual editing.
Yes but not everything has FLAC compatibility so keep that in mind before batch processing your whole collection to FLAC. iTunes doesn’t support this format natively, you need a specific plugin I haven’t used in quite a while so I can’t say if it’s compatible with the latest versions.
Itunes does not, and likely never will support FLAC. Apple has their own lossless format called ALAC which is basically equivalent to FLAC and should work fine in Traktor too.
Itunes can of course easily convert from AIFF/WAV to ALAC.
. I know there is no standardisation over WAV tagging so they tend to be problematic in this aspect, other than that you should be good with any of them.