Wav or MP3 for Your DJ Music Collection

0:00 My name is Jonathan Ellaskins, The DJ Tutor, and welcome to the kitche

Right, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Jonathan Ellaskins, The DJ Tutor, and welcome to the kitchen. Now, hopefully this video will be short, sharp and straight to the point, helping you to make the right choice. MP3 or WAV? Right, so you're probably wondering what they are to begin with. Well, MP3 basically is a compressed format of a file so for example if you've got a music file imagine you've got a music file and the audio quality is exactly the same as the audio quality as it was made by the producer so if you imagine a big bag of sugar and that is the original audio quality you take that bag of sugar and you've got exactly the same bag of sugar same size same content and everything Whereas MP3 is the big bag of sugar and what they do, they throw a lot of it away and you end up with a smaller bag of sugar. Now that sounds a little bit bizarre but the analogy works when if you take the big bag of sugar and mix it with water and drink it, it's going to be very sweet. In fact, probably make you puke. But if you take...

1:41 Hence, a lot of people used MP3

The smaller bag of sugar and mix it with the same amount of water that you used with the bigger bag of sugar, it's not going to taste as sweet. Now, the analogy there is very similar to MP3 versus WAV because MP3, the audio quality is not as good as WAV. So why should you really only use WAV now? Well, if we go back to the late 90s and MP3s all of a sudden was the rage. It was great because it was very difficult with the low bandwidths to transfer music files from one place to the other. Hence, a lot of people used MP3. In fact, with the likes of Napster, that's what you used because it was quick and easy and you didn't really care about the bad quality. The fact that you had loads of tracks On your hard drive of 4GB was amazing. Yes, believe it or not, some computers in the late 90s had a hard drive of 4GB. Wow. But nowadays you can get a thumb drive with 128GB+. The bandwidth, the movement of those zeros and ones across the web is so fast. So there is no need now to have MP3.

Now, OK, to the discerning ear, you play an MP3 track and then you play a WAV track. And, you know, if you're on a really rubbish sound system, you probably won't hear the difference. You probably won't. Or if you're on a sound system that's turned up to the max, you're probably not going to hear the difference. But if you've got a very good audio system and you play a WAV track and then you play the same track in MP3, you are going to hear the difference. The sound is... It's the difference between taking a ride in, I don't know, like for example a Ford Escort doing 90 miles an hour or jumping in a Porsche at doing 90 miles an hour. They will both do 90 miles an hour. The first one just about but the difference is the one car is going to be really stretching it whereas the Porsche, the other one is just going to be strolling along happily thinking come on is this all you can do. Alright.

3:32 In fact, terabytes now

Now also as well, like I said, you have got external hard drives that can hold mega gigabytes. In fact, terabytes now. And also most programs, DJ programs will allow you to use WAV. So really I'm going to finish off with this video. It's very simple, right? Just really simple. Try to use WAV because if you have a compressed MP3 You can't turn that to a WAV. Now, maybe you sort of can, but you're not going to get the quality. So in other words, what I'm saying here is once you've got that MP3 quality, unless you are super intelligent and you've got some powerful computer, someone's going to say I'm wrong here, but... I don't care because the way I see it is once you have taken the quality away, you've snipped the highs, you've snipped the lows, you're left with the middle bit, you can't make that any better. Whereas if you have a WAV, you can if you want to compress that to an MP3, make sure you have a copy of it though.

To keep as reference. So I hope this is a bit of a help. Don't forget there's loads of videos and research out there on WAV and MP3, but if you are a new DJ and a mate down the road has got a hard drive with millions of tracks on it, then beware. Because if you want to become a professional DJ and play good quality music, try and stick to WAV or FLAC, which is another one. There are other formats, but generally WAV is good. Practice and enjoy. Thank you.

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.