The digital 12-inch: Now or later?
posted by on June 20 at 9:03 AM
In my morning mail comes an annoucement from a PR firm that tomorrow, eMusic will be making “Gets Mine,” the new 12-inch single from Stone’s Throw artist Oh No available as a free download. “This is the first in a series Stones Throw tracks that will be offered exclusively through eMusic, and very likely a bellwether for the DJ community,” writes the enthusiastic publicist.
Now, I love Stone’s Throw, what with Peanut Butter Wolf at the helm, and chief groove archeologist Egon by his side. But I have my reservations about the significance of such an event. First of all, iTunes has been making 12-inch singles from the BMG archives, with a variety of remixes new and old, availabe for several months. I’ll grant you Taylor Dayne is not as cool as Oh No (the Pointer Sisters are another matter entirely), but Lord knows, remixes aplenty are out there in the ether.
More importantly: If most download services make the music available via mp3 and other lo-fi formats, how useful is this stuff to club DJs? It’s one thing to play a mp3 file in an intimate bar setting, but on a bumping system in a big room? They usually sound like shit.
Do other DJs feel the same way? If you’re going to be “spinning” (or, more importantly, mixing) a 12-inch remix track, can you live with it in mp3 format, or would you rather have the option of downloading it as a time-consuming but better sounding WAV file? If you do the latter, are you just gonna burn it to CD and then delete the file or move it to a portable storage device ASAP? Is the use of mp3 files as a promotional tool for club DJs really that big an advancement, or would you rather still be serviced with white label vinyl and promo CDs for a while longer, until the audio quality on portable music media improves? Do laptop mixing tools allow you to bump up fidelity of these sort of files, thus rendering my question silly? (I admit, I don’t laptop or iPod DJ - never have, and probably won’t for a while - so I’m not tech-savvy about certain applications for DJs.) Discuss.
mp3's don't sound like shit if you've got them encoded properly. anything at or above 192 sounds good on a big system. nothing sounds as good as vinyl, but i've played full sets with mp3's and never had a single sound quality issue. if you buy music from iTunes, you're buying the shittiest possible sound quality possible. If you buy from Kompakt, Bleep or Beatport, you're getting high quality rips that will sound great on a big system.
the biggest draw in being a digital dj is the flexibilty and size of your library. i can bring 20K tracks with me and have them available to play at any time, with search functionality. if i were still mixing vinyl, i'd bring less than 100 records, probably closer to 50 and have to flip through them. What if my killer tune has a skip or some annoying scratch that makes the quiet bits pop?
btw, how can you say mp3's usually sound like shit on a big system? did you know that most laptop dj's use WAV files to mix and not mp3s? when you see a dj with a laptop, the odds are good that he/she is mixing with uncompressed audio files. if the sound sucks and the mixes are boring, you have a problem with the dj, not the method of delivery.
WAV isn't the only option for full-quality digital audio. FLAC and Apple Lossless are a couple of formats that maintain the full audio fidelity of a CD while reducing filesize to a more manageable level (about half the size of a wav file, about double the size of the highest quality mp3s). That would be a good option for online stores who want to cater to digital DJs. I know Warp's online store has a few releases avilable in FLAC.
nothing sounds as good as vinyl
I'm getting this printed on a T-shirt.
mp3's are the AM radio of the new millennium.
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