Advice sought on tunes lower than 256kbps

Hey Jay Q,

Big text, like I don’t need to get going with my day! (LOL … this coming from mr. Wall of Text himself, but that’t beside the current point 🙂 ).

Long story, short answer. Don’t ever play below 192kbps. It should be the absolute bottom treshold and even then only played in total emergency. Use 320 kbps if you can, 256 if you must for MP3, 256AAC is fine of course too. Especially going to clubs and taking stuff on usb-sticks I can see why you won’t want to use lossless formats. Also on DJ laptops, where using SSDs is a really good best practice, prices per GB are still relatively high, so here too mp3 320 is, imho, the best alternative.

I would not, under any circumstance, play 128 kbps tracks, regardless of how nice the track is. At this level EVERYONE in the house will know you are playing a (way) substandard quality sound. And you will not be helping your reputation and if the club has a sound engineer, you can rest assured he’ll be complaining to management about it, as it’s their reputation as well.

Platinum Notes is a good program and let’s you clean up tracks. I only use PN with lossless originals. And I like to keep my originals (various reasons). So my workflow looks something like this:
* Buy/rip lossless original
* Collect new tracks in a separate to-do folder
* Rename original tracks if necessary (I use track # – artist – title, but use whatever works for you). If I rip from CD, I have my ripping software setup to already name the tracks according to this convention.
* Run all tracks through PN. I let PN do the MP3 conversion (CBR, 320 stereo). So I end up with the original files and the _PN.mp3 ones in the same folder.
* Using something like TotalCommander, I take the original tracks and store those on my NAS (network drive). Then I select the remaining tracks (all the ones with _PN in the name) and mass-rename them by stripping the _PN. Now I have a folder with PN’ed MP3’s.
* I run the contents of this folder through Mixed in Key. Thus adding the key (in the key tag) and the bpm and the energy level (comments field).
* Then using an MP3 tagging program (I use Tag&Rename, but there are more) I check if all the tags are ok and correct where necessary. I also bulk-rename my filenames (artist – title, since I don’t need track number in my filename here)
* Finally I import the prepared tracks into my DJ software, where I only run a beatgrid analysis (no need to have bpm and key redone since it was done in MiK already).

As you noticed, I don’t mention iTunes. I know many of my brethren love it for music collection control, but I think it’s a dragon of a program and quite possibly the worst thing ever to come out of Cupertino. Where I use other tools, you can probably use iTunes to do some of the steps I suggested.

Of course you should have your own new track workflow that works best for you. Just wanted to share mine with you, it might help you determine what will work best for you.

Greetinx.

@djjayq,

if you can’t find the tracks on cd/digital, people sell their personal collections of vinyl & cds via http://www.discogs.com/

i’ve never bought from there before, but its another option…

Also regarding programs that automatically update all your ID3 tags, I just did my whole collection with – MusicBrainz Picard MP3 Tagger http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Picard

with really good results. less then a 5th of the collection it couldn’t find any info for, the info it did find was correct. Now as Vintage said, I have to do it again with mixed in key for the BPM, Key & NRG info. then I’m set.

if you try picard MP3 Tagger, once you load up a folder of tunes to scan, run a “scan” first, then whatever is left unmatched run a “lookup” and it’ll find a few more. It also modifies the tags of the unmatched left overs, which I like, but it you don’t like, then just save the ones it matched, and it won’t alter the tags of the left overs… this will make more sense once you start using the program if you choose too…

Peace.