Need to burn flac to CD for DJing - any advice

[Caged]

Indeed. I go to Fabric every fortnight and have never had tinnitus after, even when spending all night in room 3 which has immense sound for the size of the room. Spent a couple hours in a Walkabout or Oceana and my ears are ringing for days after.

A properly calibrated system in a proper club and you can pick out the instruments and nuances in the music rather than just a brash mishmosh of sound.

I think the original argument was that you can't tell what bitrate something is on a club system (or the differences between a high bitrate MP3 and lossless file) unless it's something terribly low or the file encoder was broken. I'm not denying that some venues sound incredibly good. It doesn't matter how good the source material is if it's going into a DJM-800 anyway, those things manage to destroy everything that goes through them.

Two random questions; I have had to abandon flacs and go for other methods of obtaining the tracks. The tracks that I have managed to get are 320kbit, 320kbit is ok, but is there a way to verify that the quality is efficient rather then just low bitrate lossless, in other words to make sure that it is actually 320kbit quality. Also when I burn 320kbit onto a CD will it actually be 320kbit on the disc or will it be upscaled to CD bitrate size?

For the second part, it will get converted into the same format that CD audio is recorded at, but it won't lose any quality in this process. For the first part, trust your ears. If it sounds fine then don't worry about the nitrate.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'low bitrate lossless', since that's a bit of an oxymoron.

 

[Dark Light]

I think the original argument was that you can't tell what bitrate something is on a club system (or the differences between a high bitrate MP3 and lossless file) unless it's something terribly low or the file encoder was broken. I'm not denying that some venues sound incredibly good. It doesn't matter how good the source material is if it's going into a DJM-800 anyway, those things manage to destroy everything that goes through them.



For the second part, it will get converted into the same format that CD audio is recorded at, but it won't lose any quality in this process. For the first part, trust your ears. If it sounds fine then don't worry about the nitrate.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'low bitrate lossless', since that's a bit of an oxymoron.

What is mean is lossless is good quality but low efficiently, so by low bitrate lossless I mean 320mbit that is low efficiency.

So will the tracks take up the same amount of same regardless of quality is what I am asking?

Also, with the quality, I listening to them, but I think that I am being paranoid as I am listening to the audio quality and I might be hearing things that are meant to be there but sound a bit off. Also my speakers are not that great.

 

[Caged]

If you're burning an audio CD then it's the length of the track that determines how much of the CD it takes up. The format of the file you want to convert to burn onto the CD is irrelevant.

 

[mrk]

If you're burning an audio CD then it's the length of the track that determines how much of the CD it takes up. The format of the file you want to convert to burn onto the CD is irrelevant.

Yup you don't need special tools, just whatever app you use to play the Flac will more than likely have Audio CD burning built in anyway, failing that there are plenty of free CD burning apps that will burn Audio CDs from whatever audio file you have.

 

[OhEsEcks]

What is mean is lossless is good quality but low efficiently, so by low bitrate lossless I mean 320mbit that is low efficiency

 

[mrk]

That's enough internet for today I think haha

 

[Rroff]

Indeed. I go to Fabric every fortnight and have never had tinnitus after, even when spending all night in room 3 which has immense sound for the size of the room. Spent a couple hours in a Walkabout or Oceana and my ears are ringing for days after.

A properly calibrated system in a proper club and you can pick out the instruments and nuances in the music rather than just a brash mishmosh of sound.

Most people don't go to clubs to pick out the instruments and nuances totally know what you mean though rarely been to any of the local clubs and not come home with my ears ringing whereas when I lived in London and got to go to some of the better clubs a different story.

Used to support a friend who did some DJing in the local clubs (and knew his stuff) and we'd always laugh when you'd get the inevitable DJ coming on after him who'd take one look at the decks and give that head shake like "this guy has no idea what hes doing" and then proceed to whack all the eq controls to max :|

 

[Spook187]

It doesn't matter how good the source material is if it's going into a DJM-800 anyway, those things manage to destroy everything that goes through them.

I've used dozens of 800's never had a problem with the quality coming out of them, the 600 maybe.

 

[ArchAnGeL]

Why do you need to convert. No serato/traktor in da club?

Also think mp3 320 CBR or V0 VBR more than sufficient

Otherwise extract FLAC and burn Wav as that is what any "direct" burning software is likely to do anyway when making an audio CD.

If you are not burning audio CD then why convert for a data CD?

 

[Yaayuh!]

Have a read: http://music.tutsplus.com/tutorials/quick-tip-burn-your-cds-correctly--audio-5171

Make sure that next time you are creating CDs, or are instructing an artist to burn a CD to be used for playback that there are actual WAV files being burned, not heavily compressed MP3s. Logic allows you to bounce directly to MP3 and many take this route automatically without thinking. When you are going to burn a track from your DAW make sure it is set at 44.1kHz WAV file at 16 bit. That's the correct settings for directly burning them to CD.

Then just burn an audio CD using one of a plethora of programs.

 

[Dark Light]

First it was past midnight when I posted that and what I was trying to say is that one could just convert something like 64kbit to flac, but that wouldn't make it good quality. So what I was getting at is how do you know if the bitrate actually represents the quality, rather then someone just converting 64kbit to 320kbit for example.

Why do you need to convert. No serato/traktor in da club?

Also think mp3 320 CBR or V0 VBR more than sufficient

Otherwise extract FLAC and burn Wav as that is what any "direct" burning software is likely to do anyway when making an audio CD.

If you are not burning audio CD then why convert for a data CD?

I need to convert the mp3 to CD format so that it can play in a normal CD player.

 

[Rozzy85]

So what I was getting at is how do you know if the bitrate actually represents the quality, rather then someone just converting 64kbit to 320kbit for example.

You can compare wave forms but if you don't have the uncompressed source material then you can't do that and can only trust your ear.

 

[Janesy B]

You can compare wave forms but if you don't have the uncompressed source material then you can't do that and can only trust your ear.

You can tell transcodes by looking at the spectrals, something you can do in Audacity, Cool Edit or Adobe Audition. If the file has been transcoded from a lower bit rate you'll obviously spot that the cut off is lower than it should be. Obviously it's best to have the source but there are tell tale signs of a transcode from a lossy format.

 

[Rozzy85]

That is interesting. I did think if it'd be possible to detect the artifacts or a pattern using some method. Didn't know audacity had such a feature so will have to take a look.

 

[pioneer2000]

The DJs and target audience will know if it's the file being played is lossless or lossy, and they can distinguish between different bitrates.

LOL. Most fantastic comment i've ever read on the internet.

No, they really cannot do that.

 

[~Divine~Wind~]

Yes to an extent, but I am also a computer scientist, so I want to do it correctly.

But surely you should be an audio scientist?

Like rat assed clubbers popping pills like M&M's are gonna notice the difference

 

[Caged]

I've used dozens of 800's never had a problem with the quality coming out of them, the 600 maybe.

Every one I've seen sounds terrible regardless of what the attenuation on the back is set to. They're built pretty well but that's really the only good thing I can say about them. The 900/2000s are much better in this regard.

Anyway, this is getting off topic now.

 

[Dark Light]

Does the bitrate affect the amount you can put on the disc, or does everything just get increased to CD format? So basically how many minutes can I fit on a 700mb disc from 320kbps MP3s?

 

[mrk]

An Audio CD is limited by time.

 

[Dark Light]

An Audio CD is limited by time.

Most CDs say 80 minutes, so I am presuming that if you want to play it in a normal CD player then the data must be converted to the format the CD uses.