Mp3 files are small.

We all know that size is relative. Afterall my dad grew up in an era where 10 mb was considered a bottomless pit. Of course, in the modern music world, 10 mb might as well be equivalent to ten itsy-bitsy particles of dust. In other words, it is virtually nothing. To give you an idea of how small a one minute mp3 file can be, I will tell you that one of the files you heard is about a fifth the size of 10 mb (why are you making us do math in a music blog)? To be exact, it is 1,963,360 bytes or roughly 2 mb in size. Though 1,963,360 may seem like a big number, when used to quantify bytes it is pretty tiny. Think of it this way: one megabyte is microscopic, and one byte is really microscopic. Okay, so how about wav files. How big are those?

Wav files are massive.

Though you may not have noticed a difference between the two files, what if I told you that one of the files is roughly 9 TIMES the size of the other? So, multiply 1,963,360 by 9 (no thankyou) and what do you get? Almost 18 MILLION. The wav version of those two files, is 17,382,362 bytes or 17.9 megabytes in comparison (to 2 mb). And to most people, it sounds EXACTLY the same as the mp3. So, if the two are virtually the same and one takes up significantly less data than the other, would it make sense to stop using wav’s altogether? Not necessarily. Here’s why.

 Mp3 files are very poor in quality compared to wavs.

I can’t stand when someone fills up a half empty bottle of soap with water –as if that magically turns it into a full bottle of soap. Okay, it’s a full bottle but when you go to pump it you are still pumping out 50% water. Just as frugalists think replacing empty bottles with water is an efficient alternative to replacing the bottles themselves, lots of musicians think exporting projects as mp3’s is a no-brain solution to preserving their sessions while saving data. So instead of picturing someone filling up a half-empty bottle of soap with water, now imagine someone filling up a bottle that is only about a tenth full with 9/10 of water. Mp3 files are lossy, which means they do not feature the full frequency spectrum as their wav counterparts. They filter out really low and really high frequencies. They are in essence, “watered down.” They may be just as loud as wavs but like the diluted soap bottles, they don’t contain the “full product.”

Wav files are a standard for distributing.

If you are intending to release music or finished products, it is essential that you bounce sessions as wavs. If you want to upload files to SoundCloud, you are best off exporting files as wavs because much of the music distribution platforms already compress files to begin with, which means if you submit a lossy mp3 file to a platform which adds more compression, you will be losing much more of the quality than if you upload a wav file which contains no compression from the start.

Mp3 files are a standard for demo and broadcast.

If you want to show a client a sample of an idea you are having it might make sense to bounce the session off as an mp3 especially if you are transferring files through email. When you present a file to a big-wig agent as a finished-product you should present it as a wav. When such files are broadcast over the radio, they are converted and compressed into mp3’s. It makes sense given the massive amount of data that it would take to broadcast wav files in their purest form.