If you are preparing your music for a CD, 44.1 kHz and 16 BIT are also the standard format for CDs as well! This makes it really easy to remember. Remember, it’s better to be in control of these things. I know some aggregators and distributors will accept 24 BIT or 96 kHz sample rates, but UNLESS YOU ARE SPECIFICALLY uploading to a specialty high resolution audio provider, STICK WITH THE GOLD STANDARD 44.1 kHz and 16 BIT to prevent any weird conversion problems. The only time that should ever happen is if there is NO OTHER OPTION. With that in mind, the gold standard for audio is STILL 44.1 kHz at 16 BIT WAV files.ĭo NOT submit MP3s or any other lossy file formatsfor distribution. We do NOT want to just blindly trust that the distributor will “do it right”. It’s also nice to be in control of the conversion process, so we know what the exported song will sound like when it ends up on the platforms. So a good strategy for getting the best sound is to use the most commonly accepted file formats, because this will minimize the number of times that a distributor might convert our song. So, we want to maximize our quality while minimizing the number of times we convert between sample rate, bit depth, and file formats. The distributors need to convert our files for the various streaming platforms. When we submit our songs to a distributor to go onto Spotify, Apple Music, etc., there are a few things we need to know. Best Song Export Settings – Goal and Strategy
In this article (and video below) I dive deep into what happens when you submit your songs for distribution and how that plays a role in what the best settings are for our music. There are so many opinions about what the best song export settings are, but no one has ever explained WHY there are so many different settings and WHAT the strategy is for releasing our songs to make them sound as good as they can.