ANSWER · MASTERING & EXPORT
WAV or MP3 from Club Ready Music
“Should I download WAV or MP3?”
Use the MP3 for DJing and the WAV for releasing, editing or archiving. Club Ready Music always produces the MP3, a 320 kbps constant-bitrate file with cue points, beat grid, BPM, key and artwork embedded. The WAV is 24-bit, 48 kHz, lossless, and is produced when the WAV option is on, which it is by default.
The MP3
- 320 kbps CBR, encoded with LAME at its highest quality setting from the mastered 48 kHz signal.
- ID3v2.3 tags: title, artist, album, genre, BPM, key, comment with Camelot and Open Key, and the cover art.
- Serato hot cues and beat grid written into the file, so intro end, first drop and outro start appear as coloured cues on load.
- Smallest download, about 12 MB for a five-minute track.
At 320 kbps the difference from lossless is inaudible on a club system in any blind test that has been run with care. Every commercial DJ pool delivers 320 MP3 for the same reason.
The WAV
- 24-bit PCM at 48 kHz, stereo, about 50 MB for five minutes.
- Lossless: an exact copy of the mastered signal before any encoding.
- Basic text tags for title, artist, BPM and key; no embedded hot cues.
- The format distributors require for streaming releases and that radio playout systems use natively.
Choose the WAV when the file will be processed again: a distributor's transcoder, a radio station's chain, a DAW edit, a mastering engineer, or long-term storage. Each generation of lossy encoding adds artefacts, so you want the chain to start lossless.
Both come from the same master
The hard start, mono bass, bass fade and two-pass loudness normalisation are applied once, and the result is split to the MP3 encoder and the WAV writer in the same step. The two files are the same performance at the same level; only the container differs.
The DJ pack
The DJ pack button downloads a zip containing the MP3, the WAV if one was rendered, the cover JPEG, a plain-text cue sheet with times, a rekordbox XML for that track, and a short README. It is the simplest way to get everything for one take.
Which to keep
Keep both if you have the space. The MP3 goes into your DJ library; the WAV is your master. If you only keep one, keep the WAV: you can always make an MP3 from it, but not the reverse.
Stems
The Master & export panel has a Stems option.
Frequently asked
Is the WAV included by default?
Yes. The WAV 24/48 option is on by default. Untick it before rendering if you only want the MP3.
Does the WAV have cue points?
The WAV carries basic text tags. Hot cues and the beat grid are embedded only in the MP3 and listed in the DJ pack's cue sheet and rekordbox XML.