As a DJ. Which bitrate is better? 320CBR or V0?

Hey Vesper,

That would get into a much too complicated discussion. Actually using original wav files is easier on your DJ software than using MP3’s is! It hasn’t got much to do with the size of the file. It might load slightly faster due to it’s size (highly dependent on the software and hardware you are using), but isn’t automatically the best option.

It’s like the discussion of do you need full stereo or does joint stereo suffice? In theory joint stereo should be good enough. If a signal is present in both channels, saving it only once makes sense. When you play it back, you just pump it back out over both channels and presto!

It boils down to your needs and desires. Quite frankly, with today’s disk prices, there is really no reason to worry about compression. Let’s say an average track on a CD is somewhere between 35 and 50 MB. You can buy a 3TB (= 3,000 GB = 3,000,000 MB) hard drive for next to nothing and most PC (and even some laptops) will support more than one disk. 3TB of music in wav (uncompressed) format will amount to 3,000,000/50 is at least 60,000! and that’s all in CD quality in full stereo.

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Ok, we all want to use SSDs instead of hard disks today (and I agree with that sentiment). But prices are dropping pretty rapidly on those and where a couple of years ago buying a 64GB version cost an arm and a leg, 256GB is getting towards the mainstream now. Already enough space for 5,000+ tracks in CD quality. I suspect a year or two and we’ll be seeing affordable 1TB SSD’s.

Wanna save 40-60%? Go lossless compression. FLAC or equivalent. Twice the amount of space. But then, why would you?

Good reasons to keep your music collection small are USB sticks (for those CDJ users) and iDevices (max 64GB at a very high price). For that I’d probably go for 256AAC to combine quality with space efficiency. Assuming you are using AAC compatible CDJs 🙂 .

Back to your question. Let’s assume a 32GB device (regardless of SSD, USB, iPhone, whatever). In 320MP3, say 8MB average (a 3:25 song), that would give you about 4,000 tracks. Going to V0 would save you about 18%. That’s about 720 extra tracks. Useful, but not really all that spectacular.

And there is always a pay-off. If it isn’t loss of quality (and as I said in another thread anything 256MP3 or better is good enough that very very few people can hear the difference with the original), it could be extra processor load while decompressing for playback.

In the end, AAC 256 being equal (or some say even better) than 320MP3, if saving space is your main concern, that would probably be the better option.

Longer reply than I intended, but this stuff is just not all cut and dried. Either you get 256MP3 or better and don’t worry about it, or you get picky and try to get the best compressed version you can get or go lossless altogether.

Greetinx.

I use 320 cbr @ 44.1khz wherever available, all my vinyl rips are in this format too. Anything beyond this is overkill on 99.9% of club setups in my very honest opinion. Hard disk space is not really an issue these days so you won’t gain much by having everything in v0, whereas the mp3 vs flac/wav file size difference is far more pronounced.