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MP3 or WMA?


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Old 22-11-2006, 19:17
becky12123
 
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Hi i have a mp3 to wma converter and i was wondering which one has the better sound quality?

Thanks
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Old 22-11-2006, 19:34
Ugg
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It's a "how long is a piece of string" question - both are lossy compressed formats, and the more you lose, the smaller the resulting file but the lower the quality.

However, if you've got MP3s already you won't gain any quality by converting to WMA (or vice versa) - you'll only lose a bit more.

There are plenty of comparisons aroung on the web - a quick google finds these two:
http://www.scinet.cc/articles/wma-vs-mp3/wma-mp3.html
http://ekei.com/audio/

When ripping my own CDs and LPs to a portable format I created MP3s simply because there was better device support. Set the bit rate to something that sounds "good enough" - which will depend on where you normally listen to them I guess.
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Old 22-11-2006, 19:43
sancheeez
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^^^

What he said. Not a lot to choose as long as you encode properly in the first place.

MP3 to WMA is pointless unless you're shrinking them 'cos you're desparate to save space.
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Old 22-11-2006, 20:41
mikeydb
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I'm very much in the mp3 camp, some say it's not as efficient as WMA but I have more mp3 compatible devices than WMA, in fact the only thing apart from my PC that plays WMA is a 256Mb portable flash memory mp3/wma player..
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Old 22-11-2006, 22:34
LTT
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If I'm putting stuff on to my iriver I use wma, because it gives me more space and I can't tell the difference between MP3 and WMA.
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Old 23-11-2006, 17:24
joshua321
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I think WMA is probably the best for medium bitrates (100 - 192 Kbps) and seems to take up less space. When ripping or recording above this level, MP3 seems to have the edge. WMA tends to score the highest overall of all the compressed audio codecs, with MP3 coming a close second, then AAC, OGG etc.

Last edited by joshua321 : 23-11-2006 at 17:25.
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