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MP3 or WMA. Which is better?
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The reason I ask is that I recently bought an MP3 player that also
supports WMA. The man reason I bought it was that is was very cheap at
just under £10. I was going to wait for the technology to improve, but
for only £10, it's hard to say no.
Anyway despite being so cheap I found it can produce good sound quality
from MP3 files, but with only 256Mb, I can only get about 3 hours worth
when encoded with good sound quality.
Ideally I would have liked to use a very efficient codec, to get more
playing time out of it. AAC would have been good, HE-AAC even better,
but it does not support that, only MP3 and WMA.
I don't have any experience with WMA, but a quick search on the net
suggests that there are plenty of encoders available. The question is,
is it worth bothering with WMA. If it is capable of highly efficient
encoding similar to AAC, then it would be worth giving it a try. If
however it is no better than the latest LAME MP3 encoder, then there
would be no point in bothering.
Does anybody have any opinions as to whether WMA is any good, and if so
which encoder to go for.
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I'd stick with Lame. The results from this listening test show that it's
very good at 128kbps VBR:
and WMA Pro is different (and better) than the WMA you would use.
Make sure you use VBR.
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Yes I've started using VBR.
I'd avoided using VBR for my car stereo because it sometimes seems to
get confused by it. Eg. playing a long track, it finished and went on to
the next track before actually reaching the end of the current track.
My new cheap MP3 player though seems to handle VBR with no problems. For
the moment I've tried it with the quality setting at 4 (medium quality).
That seems to average around about 170k, and sounds very good. I could
probably get away with going for a lower quality setting, but will have
to experiment a bit.
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Download the latest version of Lame:
and read this about recommended Lame settings:
Try this as a start to average about 130 kbps:
-V 5 --vbr-new
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Very important is that you experiment with the quality settings until
you get what *you* like. A personal audio device has only got to suit
*you*, so you've got to make your own decision about the quality vs.
playing time issue. Just remember that the capacity of the players is
increasing all the time.
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Thanks. I hadn't come across that --vbr-new option before, I'll give it
a try. I don't think I need to download a new version as that document
recommends at least 3.94, while I already have version 3.96 installed.
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Actually I did end up downloading the latest version (3.97b, or
something like that) the version 3.96 I had installed kept crashing when
I used -newvbr along with -V 4. The latest version doesn't seem to
suffer from this problem.
Richard E.
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-V5 sounds reasonable, but obviously I'll need to experiment a bit. -V4
sounds very good so I could probably go a fair bit lower.
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I find this front-end to be good for MP3:
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Yes, I use EAC for converting to AAC. Have you tried out Nero's new free
AAC/AAC+ command line encoder:
Their AAC+ encoder is a lot better than it used to be.
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Is it better than iTunes' latest?
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I don't think iTunes has AAC+ yet, has it?
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No, but that would only be of interest if you would like to encode at
low bitrates.
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Why wouldn't anyone want to use low bit rates, when 64k AAC+ sounds
adequate for most listening environments.
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It does not suit mine. And this includes planes, trains and automobiles.
gr, hwh
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Richard E.
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gr, hwh
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gr, hwh
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That would presumably be useful for people who prefer a graphical front
end. Personally though I prefer to write DOS batch files, as I can then
leave them encoding large numbers of tracks while I get on with
something else.
Since I now have my entire CD collection stored in FLAC, I plan to also
make MP3 versions so that I can easily select what I want (once I settle
on the best settings). That will run into thousands of tracks, so I
think I'll be sticking to batch files run in the the command line
interface.
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I'll probably encode a few CDs at a lower quality setting (a higher
number surprisingly) and then take it out for a walk to see if I notice
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I'd try those -V ... presets if I were you.
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Yes. I suspect that I could squeeze more than 3 hours into 256Mb without
spoiling the quality.
Richard E.
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the difference.
Richard E.
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Richard E.
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