[Scott Simpson]

I’m not sure if bumping is uncool or just pointless, but….bump?

Canadian broadcaster brought up in analog, living in digital. Radio’s my career, audio-video-photography are hobbies that make a buck here and there.

[Scott Simpson]

I’ll second what John said, and add another reason or two.

I’ve also downloaded production music from Videoblocks, and I like it. When I’m doing a video and want to add a backing track, I’ll go to my folder of production music and sort it by length, then check some files close to the length of my piece to make sure the music is appropriate for the content. From there, I can use Vegas’ time-stretching function to make the music match the picture perfectly.

Doing that with WAV ought to sound better than MP3 all the time.

Now, having said that, I’ve downloaded most of the items as MP3. This is a “do as I say, not as I do” example.

As for the difference between the two formats — WAV is a file in which the audio signal is sampled and represented at high fidelity…usually 44,100 times or 48,000 times per second. The files are large, because the WAV file stores the sample values at, what, 44k per second of audio.

MP3 allows for smaller file sizes because it analyzes the audio signal and completely gets rid of information that research has shown people supposedly can’t hear. What’s left after that throw-away process is then compressed further — you’ve probably used ZIP and RAR files, and those are data compression schemes, too.

So, because MP3 throws away so much information to achieve smaller file size, the only defensible reason for using MP3 is because file size is more important than quality. Logic suggests that if you’re doing video production, storage space is not your biggest concern. Thus, you’re probably going to want to get WAV files, always.

Canadian broadcaster brought up in analog, living in digital. Radio’s my career, audio-video-photography are hobbies that make a buck here and there.