You’ve spent hours perfecting your songs, pouring your heart out, making sure you don’t bump the microphone, and yet your ok to save your final recorded versions as low quality mp3′s?  C’mon it’s time you got a little bit nerdy about sound.   This is a guide to how to upload your songs to Bandcamp in full high definition. What’s with the WAV/AIFF/FLAC upload requirement? Why doesn’t Bandcamp just accept mp3s?

One of Bandcamp’s major points of difference is their ability to allow people to download full high definition sound quality.  WAV, AIFF and FLAC are high-fidelity (lossless) formats. By starting with the highest possible quality source, Bandcamp can convert your track into a bunch of different format and quality combinations, including MP3 (320, VBR), Ogg Vorbis, Apple Lossless, FLAC and AAC (aka .m4a or iTunes store format).

Sure, most fans will just want the mp3 and won’t know or care about anything else, but there’s a rabid minority out there who’ll love that you’re giving them a choice. And if a new format/quality becomes à la mode (like when Amazon’s mp3 store made iTunes’ 128k AACs seem antiquated), they’ll transcode to that too, without you having to do a thing.

Getting specific, your uploaded source material must be lossless, at least 16-bit/44.1kHz (“CD quality”). Higher quality sources are supported: 24-bit and 32-bit, with sample rates up to 192kHz (your FLAC-downloading fans will worship at your feet).

So how do I get my tracks into WAV or AIFF?

New tracks (from the studio) are probably already in WAV or AIFF or can easily be saved in one of those formats by your audio editing software. And if you’re importing old tracks from CD, it’s pretty easy too: just rip the tracks to WAV or AIFF using iTunes.

Select “Preferences…” from the iTunes menu

Click the Import Settings button in the General tab (for versions of iTunes earlier than 8.0, click the Advanced tab and select “Importing”)

Next to “Import Using:” choose “AIFF Encoder” or “WAV Encoder.”

Simple export those to where you can find them, and upload away.