In this part we’ll talk about the most important music formats. In the past it was the cassette, the record or the CD. In fact, there are still DJ’s today who play with the vintage media. However, we will focus on digital formats that DJ’s and DJanes use today.
Your DJ software can play at least one of these formats. Here is a small overview of the music formats:
wma
Windows Media Audio files are files created by a Windows operating system, in which audio material is stored. The quality here ranges from totally crappy to very good. To agree on one thing from the start: mp3 is the format we will refer to specifically later. So we will be saving songs in our library as mp3. If you have wma files that are of acceptable quality, convert them to mp3 files. Please don’t forget to include the tags for the song here.
wav
Wavedata files have a lot of sound information as well as information about the creator of the file, information that MAY be important if it is correct. The quality of such files also ranges from very poor to very good. DVD, Blueray and cinema productions work with WAV format because it is lossless audio material – so top codec for audio! Unfortunately WAV files are very, very large and oversized for our purposes – so convert wav files to mp3.
ogg
The ogg codec is a freely usable code, so open source. It was mainly used to package files with video, audio or video and audio material and make them streamable without any further steps. For our purposes also not optimal, so we stay with mp3 files.
mp3
mp3 files are compressed audio files. Again, the quality ranges from very poor to very good, common determination of the resolution (quality) of our mp3 files is the bitrate. I now sweepingly claim that anything below 128kb/s does not belong in our collection. Unfortunately I have to admit that I also have songs with 96kb/s in my library, but this has a simple reason: I haven’t found the songs in a better quality or I haven’t made the effort to get these songs in a good quality (shame on me) – but I also make mistakes.
Probably the most important reason why we use mp3 as a codec: File size and quality. For our purpose of DJing in the club, hosting mp3 files is totally enough. They don’t take up much space on our hard drive relatively and serve their purpose all the time. So here the ratio is right.
Convert to Mp3: Any Audio Converter
With Any Audio Converter we can convert any audio format to any audio format. The tool is free, serves its purpose and, most importantly, it serves its purpose well. So we have a good quality of our sound files when we convert them. (Windows Software)
Download Any Audio ConverterConclusion
Good, we have now clarified that we agree on the mp3 file format. Plan enough time for the organization of your music and rather give yourself a little more effort at this point than to get everything over with quickly. Any mistake you make here can be fatal in the live session. If possible, always use 320kb/s as the quality standard for your music files.
