Mp3 To Wma

[hungrylilboy]

whats the best prog to do this?
And how much quality is lost?

[nostalgia]

dBpowerAmp with the WMA plug-in. No loss of quality noticable.

[hungrylilboy]

Originally posted by nostalgia@2 July 2004 - 12:19
dBpowerAmp with the WMA plug-in. No loss of quality noticable.
thanks

[Storm]

Originally posted by nostalgia@2 July 2004 - 13:19
No loss of quality noticable.
that kinda depends on your audio setup, doesnt it............

[nostalgia]

That's why I said noticable and not no loss at all.

[Storm]

no, i get that, what i mean was that if you have onboard audio, with cheap speakers you might not hear the diffrence, but that wouldnt nessisarily mean that someone with an expensive card and 400 dollar speakers wouldnt either

dint mean 2 dis you or anything.........

[nostalgia]

No worries.
Used dBpowerAmp with WMA plug-in myself and burned the audio output for listening on normal HiFi, that's why i concluded no noticable loss of quality.

[hungrylilboy]

arrgggh!
the reason why i asked was that i just bought a new mp3 which plays wma as well as mp3 and holds nearly double the amount of wma to mp3.

now i converted some and they are nearly exactly the same size...

what have i done wrong? i am using 192 for both. does the player compress them and u get more that way?

[AndrewBarker]

Originally posted by hungrylilboy@2 July 2004 - 15:23
now i converted some and they are nearly exactly the same size...

what have i done wrong? i am using 192 for both. does the player compress them and u get more that way?
I am no expert with .wma files, but if you were to encode mp3 at 192kbits/s it would be the same quality as a wma file that was encoded at a less bit rate

this is how I think it works, and I'm sure if I've got it wrong then someone will correct me

[hungrylilboy]

Originally posted by AndrewBarker+2 July 2004 - 16:35--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (AndrewBarker @ 2 July 2004 - 16:35)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-hungrylilboy@2 July 2004 - 15:23
now i converted some and they are nearly exactly the same size...

what have i done wrong? i am using 192 for both. does the player compress them and u get more that way?
I am no expert with .wma files, but if you were to encode mp3 at 192kbits/s it would be the same quality as a wma file that was encoded at a less bit rate

this is how I think it works, and I&#39;m sure if I&#39;ve got it wrong then someone will correct me [/b][/quote]
so...i have to encode the wma&#39;s at half the mp3 size, which is how the player gets twice as many on?

[hungrylilboy]

ok the manual (yes i read it) says that the number of files is based on 128kp/s for mp3 and 64kb/s for wma.

can someone confirm or deny that the quality changes for this difference?

[nostalgia]

Once read in a Dutch computermagazine that WMA has more quality with less data so this could mean that a "big" MP3 with quality 128 matches a smaller WMA 64 file.

edit: never tested it myself. I convert downloaded WMA to MP3&#39;s.

[Chewie]

Look, if you can imagine scrunching up a brown paper bag then opening it out again, you can imagine that when re-opened, the paper bag will have creases in it, yet still be recognisable as a paper bag.
That is what you do when you compress an audio clip to an mp3 or wma file; there is some quality loss, and the more it&#39;s compressed, the more quality is lost.
Now if you were to again crumple up the paper bag and re-open it, there would be more noticeable creases in it, yes?
Right, that is how you must imagine the audio that you compress once, then uncompress and compress again as something else... there is a quality loss even if the sizes after first and last compression are the same.

Don&#39;t re-encode compressed audio/video clips because you&#39;ll lose quality that cannot be replaced.

[nostalgia]

Now this is an example story I even understand ;) .
But seriously, you&#39;re right, the more you compress and decompress the less the quality gets. But compressing 1 or 2 times in a fairly good bitrate doesn&#39;t give that much qualityloss that most people would notice. The bitrate has to be 192 or higher. Encoders are just filtering out audiofrequencies the human ear can&#39;t cope with or has trouble coping with. Next they filter out tones that sound the same. I you aren&#39;t an experienced listener (e.g. studio-engineer or whatever) then it is hard to hear the difference between a compressed MP3 or WMA on a high bitrate and the original audio track. But nevertheless it is qualityloss cause sounds are filtered out.
So compressing once or twice on a high bitrate is fairly safe but after that it even becomes noticable to my ears and I&#39;m not an expert.