Has anybody been converting wav files to WMA using WMP? If so, do you hear a noticable difference between WMA and MP3 files at the same conversion rate?

Thanks,

Ed

Has anybody been converting wav files to WMA using WMP? If so, do you hear a noticable difference between WMA and MP3 files at the same conversion rate?

It's rather well accepted that WMA files have better fidelity than MP3's at the same bit rate. At 128kbps, most average schmoes can hear the difference. Beyond that, I think it takes a machine or a golden ear audiophile to tell the difference.

Yeah, I had this discussion with a friend of mine recently. He was saying how the new Apple music service integrated into the iPod and iTunes nicely, and cited the AAC format as being better than MP3 (a claim that WMA also makes). My response was that once you go up to a higher bit rate than 128, you can't tell the difference among file formats. Most comparisons among encoders or among file formats will do their tests at 128 or below, because it's only an issue at those low bit rates.

If you're hell-bent on saving the disk space, then yeah, WMA at 128 is maybe a tiny bit better than MP3 at 128. But for me, what's more important is the convenience of MP3. There are more players which support MP3, more tools to work with the file format, and much better and more varied tagging/organizing tools availble.

I'd rather encode at a higher bit rate than 128 and use the most convenient file format available. And right now, that's still MP3.

can you actually hear the difference?

WMP claimed that WMA at 64kbps was the same sound as MP3 at 128 KBPS....NOT

besides the Rio I have a cd player in my car and did an A/B test between WMA file at 64kbps and the actual CD and the results were quite noticable...and disappointing....i am now redoing all of the CD's that were done at 64 at 128..thats about 200 of them.

If 128 for MP3 or WMA is said to be CD quality, what would the point be to convert them at a higher bit rate?? is there a rate at which the compressed media would sound better than the source?

Thanks!

If 128 for MP3 or WMA is said to be CD quality, what would the point be to convert them at a higher bit rate?

That is market-speak BS. No lossy encoding scheme is CD quality, and certainly not 128.

can you actually hear the difference?

Yes.

Depends on the material, but yes, certain songs at 128 CBR MP3, I can tell it's a lossy-encoded version. I can hear the "watery" artifacts around the instruments. Once you know what to listen for, it's not hard. Push it up to 160 or higher, and I can't tell any more.

I've been re-doing everything at 256 CBR lately, since now I have the disk space.

There is a huge difference for me between 128 and 160 or 192k mp3s.

The 192 encoded files just seem crisper.

I agree, mp3's at 128 really sound horrible to me now. And that didn't start happening until a friend pointed out the distortions to me. I personally don't like anything below 192 CBR. I usually rip everything with a VBR with a minimum of 160, though.

- trs

192 CBR. I figure that I'll never be able to hear the difference going any higher, and that since both my empeg and fileserver have excessive capacity (in relation to my music collection) that it wasn't worth mucking around with any VBR-related issues. I only want to rip once!

Its amazing how many people don't notice the difference until you demonstrate it. A friend of mine was sick when he heard my 192 files compared to his entire collection of 128s. He had fun re-ripping!!

I always used to find 192 CBR was sufficient, but there are some bands whose music seems designed to cause artifacts even at that bitrate

Two examples which spring to mind are Muse and Pantera. I guess it's because they have stuff happening from very low to very high frequencies and 192 just ain't enough - you get jangling and pre-echoes. For some Muse tracks I either had to go to 320 (which gave me HUGE files) or go VBR, so that's what I do with everything now. It just ramps up the bitrate to cope with the complicated stuff.

256 CBR for me too.

1) Because (on the empeg at least) CBR is the only thing that gives consistantly perfect transitions with "no-gap" encoding (VBR is too flakey / twiddley)

2) /Allo-Allo (Pythonesque french accent) - "I'm only going to do this once"

3) Disk space can only get cheaper

god..now im depressed....

i converted everything first at 64..now i am 3/4 way through again at 128...and there are 200+ cd's to do!...and now it seems i have to bump that up even further...my only concern is disc space as i have a 20 gigger and at 64 i have 8 gb left...converting everything at 128 will leave me with even less and i am not looking forward to replacing yet another HD!...

but..my car ..even when sitting still..has tons of road noise (miatas never cared to emulate the comfort of a Rolls)...so hopefully between that and the damage to my hearing thanks to Walkmans....perhaps it wont matter all that much..

i guess ignorance IS bliss!

Don't feel so bad, I only did mine at that bitrate for use at home as a replacement for CD's. If it was for use in my car then I couldn't justify anything over 128 - no point (low end equipment due to thieving bar-stewards, HUGE roadnoise and a very LOUD car)

"Horses for Courses", is the expression - if it fits your needs just do it anyway.

I've got a jeep wrangler and I stll rip stuff at VBR that tends to average 190-210 kbps.

Since I use a rio receiver and my computer to listen to tunes, the CD's are never used once they are encoded. Plus, should something happen to the CD's, I would have a method of recreating a new CD that is almost sonically identical to the original.

I can tell a 128 kbps in easily half the tunes I listen to. If I'm re-encoding for my workout mp3 player, I put in high and low pass filters (ear buds are pretty limited in what they can reproduce) and use an agressive VBR scheme to try and get a decent amount of quality tunes into my 64 megs.

It doesn't use any extra processor power to playback a VBR file over a CBR one, so I don't see the point in NOT letting the encoder decide where more bits are needed.

I also was chatting with my parents about the new apple distribution website. They thought it seemed like a grand idea since you could buy what you wanted.

Once I pointed out that you would have to ditch your old digital audio equipment and buy new apple stuff, they began to see the issues that will arise.

(I love replying to my own post).

same here.
I use VBR LAME with alt preset std. Which seems to average out at 190-220 ish.
But a great deal of my listening is done at home, so the quality is much more important.

I go VBR Lame with alt preset extreme. Why take chances....

I exclusively use alt preset standard. However, with continuous albums (live etc), you get the slight dropout between tracks. I have not worked out a neat way to do this. It is possible to modify the LAME code to get gapless playback, however it's not possible to integrate that easily into EAC since it requires all tracks to be encoded at once by LAME.

And I agree with Tony. I use MP3s because of the abundance of tools like tag editors, players etc that support MP3. I may switch to Ogg when it comes to v3, but I am happy with alt preset standard and haven't really found any source music that results in artifacts I can hear.

It is possible to modify the LAME code to get gapless playback

Yep, can be done quite easily but only seems to work perfectly with CBR (and I can only vouch for the empeg as a playback device).

Rip with EAC as normal into wav's
Use a program like WinLAme to encode at CBR and tick the gapless encoding box (EAC doesn't support the gapless arg on Lame, IIRC)
Tag using your favourite tagger

Do all my albums like this as a matter of course I HATE THOSE GLITCHES

however it's not possible to integrate that easily into EAC since it requires all tracks to be encoded at once by LAME.

Many moons ago, I posted to the EAC Yahoo group asking for an option to rip the whole album, then encode it, which would make for --nogap friendly operation of EAC. However, the author didn't see the value in it. Maybe if more people lobby for this feature, he'd consider it. I have to re-rip and re-encode some day, and I'm hoping this feature shows up.

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I posted to the EAC Yahoo group asking for an option to rip the whole album, then encode it, which would make for --nogap friendly

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Ditto. I asked the author the same thing. After I explained what it meant, he came back and said it would be a fair bit of work and that he wasn't interested in doing it.

With EAC, it does all the ID3 tags too. If I rip to .WAV files and then convert in another program I have to enter a lot of stuff by hand.

With EAC, it does all the ID3 tags too. If I rip to .WAV files and then convert in another program I have to enter a lot of stuff by hand.

Yeah. I find it hard to believe that with all the complex programming that's gone into EAC, it's that hard to implement this kind of feature. All that he needs to do is provide a configuration option to defer the encoding step until after an entire album is ripped. If the option is set, you rip, then encode for each file you've selected. I guess he just doesn't wanna do it. If EAC wasn't so reliable with its ripping, I'd definitely be looking for another ripper that could support this.

In reply to:

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If EAC wasn't so reliable with its ripping, I'd definitely be looking for another ripper that could support this

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Ditto again. I was looking at CDex since it's open source, but I trust EAC so much now, I don't want to go away from it.

only seems to work perfectly with CBR

I worked with the LAME developers to fix a few bugs in their VBR support. They also put in an option to reenable VBR headers for nogapped VBR files. Unfortunately, there was a bug in the empeg player software at the time, and I couldn't test it. I haven't gotten a change to test it since. There's not been an official release of LAME since then, though, so you'd have to compile one up from CVS source.

well....i re did all my cd's (200+) at 128, deleted all my 64 stuff..uploaded the new stuff...and as feared now have only 3 gigs left on the 20 gigger when before i had 6+!

...perhaps time to upgrade to a bigger drive as well....anybody know a good source for HD's and what the going prices are??

Thanks,

Ed

I encode everything to Ogg Vorbis for use at home, but I've got conversion scripts for re-coding to mp3 (for stuff I've already ripped) and my scripts now generate the .mp3s as well as .oggs at rip time. All the mp3s are done on whole albums with --nogap (so that Dark Side of the Moon and Abbey Road are listenable), and all the ripping is done with cdparanoia with maximum paranoia. And the artist/title/album tags are set in both the oggs and the mp3s, pulling info from a local CDDB/freedb tree and letting you see/edit it before tagging begins (or letting you enter it yourself if the album isn't in the database).

The ripping and encoding are decoupled so you can run one or both at once (e.g. you can defer encoding while ripping a bunch of albums, then encode while you're sleeping/at work, or you can do them simultaneously)

It's all python and Bourne shell stuff tested only under Linux, but if you're handy you might be able to get it running under Windows with a bit of tweaking. It's also pretty rough around the edges but I'd happily let anyone who wants to have a copy (under GPL). Needs oggenc for the ogg stuff, LAME for mp3 stuff, cdparanoia for ripping. I think python 1.5 or newer should be fine.

Sumner