Ableton Forum

Hey friends
The question is in the title

Thanks

Wav definitely. Live converts all MP3s to wav behind the scenes anyway when you drag them into a project, so you might as well start with wav in the first place. And it sounds better.

Wakeon wrote:Hey friends :)
The question is in the title ;)

Wav, or AIFF. On a big PA there is a significant difference. You only need to ask yourself if the MP3 format was created to shift pitch and tempo seamlessly. It wasn't.

Nor was AIFF or Wav of course, but those formats are more forgiving and have no artefacts to begin with.

If I'm not mistaken, aiff allows you to add meta data for easy searching in iTunes?

yur2die4 wrote:If I'm not mistaken, aiff allows you to add meta data for easy searching in iTunes?

I think you can add that to Wav as well. I only buy AIFFs at Beatport, where tags are in there already. Post purchase these songs are automatically converted to Apple Lossless (ALAC) and entered into my iTunes Library and then later I add them manually to Traktor, not Live, so native conversion to a file cache is a non-issue for me.

I don't DJ per se with Live, instead I run the outputs of Traktor right into an audio track in Live and sync to Traktor (sometimes I tap the tempo instead, which works really well). It's the best of two worlds, only bringing one issue as Push normally is my Traktor Controller. I need to get another one for DJ gigs.

yur2die4 wrote:If I'm not mistaken, aiff allows you to add meta data for easy searching in iTunes?

Correct, AIFF has more support for metadata as well as embedded album artwork. Wav files have some support for metadata, but it's not nearly as complete or recognized as for AIFF files in my experience. My DJ library is definitely AIFF, so I can use it with whatever software I want and still have my artwork and things like BPM set.