I read someplace online that WMA format is comparable to high bit rate Mp3's and store bought audio cd's but take up half the data space. I am wondering if a wma ripped cd will play in most consumer devices such as desktop stereo's, ps2, xbox's, portable cd players and ect?
It should if the device is compatible with .WMA u have to c what the device can read first... u can bypass .wma with some of the demo software that u can downlaod here from the software section. http://www.afterdawn.com/software/ keep me posted...
personally I don't think wma is all that impressive over mp3. if you are looking for something of higher quality, look into MPC, FLAC, or OGG files.
Wma is just another way for microsoft to control the market, sort of like what apple is doing with there format, aac, i think. With saying that, I do have all my music converted to wma, but I'm also using a dell dj, which is compatible with wma. Do I notice a difference. Not at all, except that it takes up less space. Thats a good thing. Quality hasn't changed, but takes up less space. I certainly wood trust what djscoop says, I haven't dealt with those formats much. Make sure you check out what formats your device is compatible with. No matter what, Mp3 is still the most compatible.
The title asks for the "best" audio format, but the text asks for the most compatible... Some Best formats: [bold]APE[/bold] - unaltered original sound, best compression in the lossless quartier. And the ape picture is funny. [bold]WMA[/bold] - has lossless variant, and is Multichannel (e.g. 5.1). This is the only lossless multichannel format worldwide I know about, sounds better than DolbyDigital and DTS, and supports even 24bit/96kHz. Audiophiles love lossless surround in 24 bit !!! [bold]AMR narrow-band[/bold] - perfect if you have no menory at all to store anything.
WMA, One of the best? Say what you want about big buisness, I feel that Mp3 (LAME) is the best solution for anyone no matter what you want to do (stream, rip, record, ect...). With that said I feel Apple has produced some pretty damn good products with its line of audio formats. I've recently been dabing into Apple Lossless and must admit that I was ammazed at the sound quality. I no a lossless audio file is suppose to sound good but APE and FLAC are sometimes unstable (during decompression) and seem to encode much slower (at maximum compression using a WAVE file for a source). As far as lossy formats, AAC isn't half as bad as WMA and in the future may replace Mp3 as the main stream audio format no matter how iTunes does. Y'all know where I stand. MPC is the king but has no support. AAC/M4A is the future but Mp3 will always be in use as long as the good people that develope the LAME encoder keeping producing high quality work. Ogg Vorbis is a nice but resource consuming alternative to MPEG and Apple. WMA and WMA-Lossless are for corporate-dunmbassess! Ced
Why not have both small size and good quality? Who said you can't have both... http://smartencode.beplaced.com/ Vorbis is the future - see for yourself!
to have have small file and great quality check out this guide for ripping cd to mp3 http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/mydeneaclame.cfm i've ripped about 10 of my cd's using it and they files are all under 5 meg and the quality of most of them is 100% i get the odd mp3 that is only 99.9 but who is going to notice 0.1%
there's actually a FAQ section somewhere on Chris Myden's website that addresses that issue...it doesn't mean that only 99.9% of the track is ripped, it has something to do with the volume level I think, but even though it says 99.9% or whatever, it still is a 100% bit-accurate rip
