As you
can see from our front page, encoding tracks into MP3
format is the easiest, most cost effective way to have
all your tracks available, and they will play on
virtually any computer DJ package, portable player, and
DVD player on the market today. The other formats such
as WMA, OGG, FLAC, AAC, etc., are only supported by
certain products and OS's, so you are much safer using
the standard MP3 format in our opinion.
The
encoder you use will make a large difference in the
quality of your final product, and we find that most
people prefer the LAME encoder over the other versions
available. LAME is also free, which can make a big
difference to most people.
The
steps necessary can range from easy to complex,
depending on the results you want to achieve.
The
easy but slow way, and quality varies:
-Use a program like MusicMatch.
-Set the software to automatically
encode to MP3.
-Start putting in discs.
The
way most DJ's do it today:
-Use AudioGrabber - it's free, and
works great.
-Rip your CD's into WAV format.
-Batch convert them to MP3 overnight
(if you have a large quantity).
-Use a BPM analyzer to add the BPM
info to the tag. *
-Go through the tracks with Tag &
Rename or another tagger to add additional info.
The minimum MP3 encoding quality for
DJ work is 160kbps. You can go higher if your space
permits, but remember your noise floor at a DJ event -
it's high, so, much of that extra sound quality is lost
due to the ambient noise level at the event. If you have
plenty of disk space (and the facilities to back it up),
you might just as well go for the 320kbps encoding rate,
as it is nearly indistinguishable from the original CD
to the average ear.
Why rip to WAV first?
If you use a little forethought, you
will understand the added benefits of ripping to WAV
first, which are; it's much faster to rip to WAV, then
to rip and encode at the same time; you can then encode
the WAV's to any format you like later. A good practice
to follow if you can, is to rip to WAV, convert to MP3,
burn the WAV's to CD or DVD, then delete the WAVs off
your computer. You then have them available later if you
wish to convert them to a different format, without
having to re-rip them. The added benefit is less wear
and tear on your original audio CD as well.
Why not just use WAVs, if they are
true CD quality?
Two reasons: WAV's take up a lot of
space on your hard drive, and they aren't streaming
files like the other formats, which means they take up
lots of memory, and take much longer to load into your
player/mixer. Streaming formats read frames or packets
off of your hard drive one at a time, and therefore use
very little memory while playing.
Why is there a star next to BPM
analyzing?
Because most wedding/party and even
club jocks don't really use BPM to mix tracks, they use
their skills. If you've been mixing for years, and
mastered the art of mixing (and it is an art), you will
quickly find that trying to let a computer do it for you
is very disappointing.
Computers do some things very well,
BPM mixing is not generally considered one of them, for
many reasons. The first and foremost is the latency
encountered on a message based operating system like
Windows. It is doing many other things besides paying
attention to your mix, so it cannot devote full time
processing power to ensuring that mix is correct.
Most jocks like to have BPM
information for a general point of reference though,
when deciding on what tracks they might want to mix in
(this tends to refer to dance club jocks).
Note: Most people are using
the freebie BPM analyzer from MixMeister. This writes
the BPM into a standard TBPM tag entry, but uses UNICODE
character format, which is not readable by all DJ
software packages. If you use Tag & Rename AFTER you put
that BPM info in, you can convert it back to ANSI
character format, which most software reads.
File naming:
You will notice most ripping software
seems to make the filenames by using as their default
Artist Name - Track Name.MP3.
We have no clue as to why that is, we
can only speculate. Here's why we do it the opposite:
We have found that most people tend
to look up tracks by title (track name), more than they
do by artist. Since any search algorithm will start from
the beginning, it is obviously faster to search by
filename using Track Name - Artist Name.MP3.
So, if you more often than not use
title as the lookup, then put the title first in the
filename, if not, put the artist first.
Putting the track index in the
filename is useless, as they are no longer on the CD
(unless of course you are a trivia buff, or care for any
reason in what order they were on the original CD).
No matter which way you choose, keep
it simple is the rule (title and artist), as most
software has limited buffer space available when loading
filenames, and having a 400 character filename with all
the info in it is just slowing everything down.