Ableton Forum

hi all
does anyone use mp3s to play out or are wavs necessary to have the tunes sounding at an acceptable standard ?
if you do use mp3s what quality mp3 is necessary?
i know there are some tunes on emule i was going to download but not sure if they are of a good enough quality for a crowd.
many thanks justin

192kps are fine 320kps are as good as Wav imo

most venues have a less than perfect rig, with lots of room sound. I think the reverb and frequency modifications of most venues will hide anything from 192 upwards.

please dont play 128 though .

ugh ugh argh

A local venue spent 6 months installing a rig worth £160,000 into a 400 capacity room, with lots of room analysis and realtime processing sat in racks to monitor the sound. It still sounds shit to me.

essentially - you can get away with it, but it's never going to sound as good as a wav. You could use FLAC if you are woried about disk space - or aim to use 320kbps mp3 as much as poss.

if you can get .wav's then play them as they will sound better (even if your ears can't hear it)

i'll echo what Angstrom said above
ixnay on the 128kbps.

i've always felt that 192kbps gave the best ratio of sound quality to low file size.
and when i was using Final Scratch i usually used 192kbps or 256kbps.

Whats the story on VBR mp3's?
It seems like VBR would be the way to for highest ratio of quality/size.
Problems?

ethios4 wrote:Whats the story on VBR mp3's?
It seems like VBR would be the way to for highest ratio of quality/size.
Problems?

I use lame for encoding and I did a lot of experimenting with VBR encoding.
VBR's at the 'hi-quality' setting in lame are a tiny bit better sounding than a 256 fixed bit rate mp3 and about 10% smaller on average.

Make sure you install quicktime b4 you use VBR mp3s in Live.

I have used mp's to play out I just use high bitrates. I have to think that LAME would be better though.

For live pa stuff i am going to stick to wav. though.

if oyu are worried about disk space, you could always get an external hard disk

You don't have to use .wav. You can use .aiff too.

Disk space is cheap. I say go with 256k mp3 or don't bother to compress at all if you have the space. 192 AAC is sounds very very good to me, almost the same as uncompressed, but Live doesn't play AAC.

There's something funny that happens with 128, or even 192 mp3s. While the difference isn't obvious, there's something going on with the highs and on a good system, the listening experience suffers.

It kind of wears on me after listening to it after awhile. I think even casual listeners in a club can tell there is something different even though they might not say anything, of course.

It's kind of like if you would watch a TV with the pixels all blown up for a few hours. Your eyes would kind of hurt after awhile trying to focus on something that will never totally focus.