WMA v's MP3?

nicks

Which is the smallest of the 2?

Thanks

Nicks

weegie.geek

Technically you're meant to be able to achieve equal quality in a smaller filesize with WMA, but in practice it's only at very low bitrates anyway, nowhere near CD quality. At the bitrates that afford each codec near-CD quality, the filesizes will be very similar.

I personally wouldn't bother with WMA though, since it's not as open as MP3, and a lot of players won't touch WMA at all.

BillScarab

My wife's car CD Player supports WMA so we use it for her to listen to CD's in the car as they do come up slightly smaller so we can get more ont he disc. Other than that I always use MP3 as pretty much everything supports MP3.

Donnie

For the average listener; .wma 128kbps is roughly equivalent to .mp3 192kbps.

So if you need a smaller flie size, encode at .wma 128kbps.

Using anything less than the suggested bitrates will result in an unacceptable loss of sound quality.


For CD archiving, 320 kbps CBR or 192kbps to 256 VBR .mp3 is recommended.

nicks

Thanks you for all the replies....

Nicks

esuhl

I find that files encoded in WMA sound a LOT better than MP3s... in fact MP3s genrally sound terrible - even at 192kbps and above. Variable bitrate WMAs combine the best compression with the best sound quality, in my humble opinion...

weegie.geek

esuhl wrote: »

I find that files encoded in WMA sound a LOT better than MP3s... in fact MP3s genrally sound terrible - even at 192kbps and above. Variable bitrate WMAs combine the best compression with the best sound quality, in my humble opinion...

What mp3 encoder are you using? The encoder used plays a large part in the quality. The settings too I guess. I wouldn't use anything but LAME. The old Xing encoder used to be very fast, but the quality was awful.

My player plays wma, mp3, ogg, flac and a few other formats too iirc, but I wouldn't use anything other than mp3.

Forgot to mention earlier too, MP3's so widely used too, so if you go to get a new player you might find yourself having to re-rip the CDs if you've used another format. Your current player might be happy with WMA but to re-rip all your CDs would be a major pita.

Unless you're horrendously low on space I'd stick to MP3.

esuhl

Yeah - I use LAME when I have to use MP3s, and encode the two stereo channels separarately (can't remember what that setting is officially called). But still, the MP3s don't quite sound as detailed (high frequency sounds seem a bit fuzzy and vague, and the overall sound isn't as spacious... if that makes any sense).

And I just have a 1GB media player, so I just rip a few CDs at a time, then just delete the files when I've listened to them... but I see your point.