Hey #K,

There shouldn't be any issues with recording really long sets in Serato DJ provided you have enough free space on your drive :)

One thing to consider is the recording will split into separate files after the 2hr mark. There will be no loss in audio and the mix will continue to record as normal but if you would like to upload your mix as one file you will need to join the files in Audacity or another similar program.

Hope that helps,

Sam

Hi Sam,

Ok thanks, will do it on saturday.

Hey Sam, just a quick question about this though: what is the exact reason files are splitted after 2 hours? Is it performance-wise or any other reason?

probably beacuse if their "stable" sdj crashes you don't lose the whole mix

Just a bit of feedback for you #K. I regularly record long sets. The recording usualy ends up as 3 large file. I have never had any performance issues because of it. I record to internal memory.

ok good to know, thanks!

Hey Guys,

The reason Serato DJ splits large recordings into smaller chunks is a safety precaution.

Depending on your Harddrives file format there are maximum file sizes (ie FAT32 is 4gb) that can be handled. To make this easy we set the limit to 2hrs for all recording formats so they will be safely under the file size limit for whatever drive you record to and easy to organise afterwards.

Sam

Thanks for the info Sam :)

No worries dude :)

just wanted to say that i did it yesterday and it was fine, had no issues with dropouts or something like that, but the files split into 3 hour files not 2 hour ;)

I think that it would be great if the Serato DJ software could detect the file system that the recording is going to be saved to and did not split the files if it was on a HFS+ formatted volume...... (which is the default in recent versions of OS X)

In the Terminal:

diskutil info / | grep "File System Personality:"
File System Personality: Journaled HFS+

The HFS+ (Mac OS X Extended) maximum file size limit is 8 exabytes, or 8 billion gigabytes (8,000,000,000 GB)

maybe a tick box in preferences.... Do you want to split audio into 2GB chunks......

i got another question...I use mp3s to DJ and Serato saves them as WAV which makes the file a lot bigger. If I now use Audacity to edit my recording is there a difference in quality when I save it to mp3 again? Because the files weren't WAV files before recording, so normally there must be no difference?

Hey #K

Recording an MP3 as a WAV will not increase the audio quality of the file at all, you can't make it any better once you have lost information due to compression.

The mp3 encoding process is "lossy". The encoding process removes inaudible frequency while compressing, which has already been done as the tracks you initially mixed are mp3's. Since you are doing the same removal process again there could be some rounding error in the encoding. Even if you are encoding to the same bit rate that you started with you will still lose a little information with each re-encode and so the sound quality will by definition of the process be a lower quality.

Whether you can tell the difference between the 2 files is another kettle of fish as the differences would be very very minor...

TL;DR - There shouldn't be any major difference in audio quality. Go for it.

thanks for the (long) answer, i guess i will just try it and use my ears. ;)