Wav or Mp3

[eyes without a face]

wots the best media for editing finished tracks in Soundforge?



i thought mp3 would of been better wot with the smaller file size but ive been told that wav is better???

[Eneah]

Yes, wav is 1% (i think) better in quality and 12x bigger in file size, personally i go with MP3 whenever i can lots of programs will not allow you to use Mp3 tho



tbh a 60mb wav can be compressed to mp3 @ 16k making the file size around 500kb and still sound reasonable, great for websites and samples

[DJZeMig_L]

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!



MP3 is absolute crappy Bolloc**!! Only good for sowing stuff over the net !!!



Wav is absolute MUST (or AIFF 4 tha Mac heads)!!



Is going on 2 12" 48Khz seems 2 b tha best resolution!!



Z

[sinner]

The problem with compression, is that you always lose SOMETHING. Normally with mp3 you arent supposed to have losses in the normal audio range of humans, but when you try and edit something in mp3 format, this is when things really start to show



When you open an mp3 for edit. usually the file is exploded back to .wav for editing and then recompressed to mp3 afterwards. This starts to lead to subtle changes in the audio, and if you do it enough, it'll end up sounding like you recorded it off the radio.



Keep it in a minimally compressed format like .wav of .aiff or raw pcm data if thats what your application uses. Once you convert to mp3, give that file out to people, but dont do anymore work on that specific file.



File compression such as .zip and whatnot will compress a sound file (not as well as converting to mp3 though), but will let the original file come out the way it was first saved.



If you can manage the disk space required to juggle a whole bunch of tracks, burn them to cd, or dat or some other offline format while keeping it in its original state.



Mike






You go in hard, and you go in fast.

[eyes without a face]

i thought WAV was better, id heard it is better quality, im happy to work with big file sizes if it means better quality

[MARKEG]

100% right! WAV all the way...