Originally Posted by leeren:
“haha reading this thread reminded me of the days of my first mp3 player (a 128mb creative)
not being able to hold that many songs, i figured that if i converted my music to wma i could have atleast twice as many...
stupid me slowly converted every mp3 i had to a crappy wma file, and then erased the decent mp3 files for good!
i didn't realize until i played them through my stereo that they sounded terrible, but it was too late!”
The only way you would have got twice as many songs in the same amount of space, is if you had encoded the WMAs at half the bitrate of the MP3s !

Another reason it sounded bad is that you converted the (already lossy) MP3s into WMAs.
If you had converted an uncompressed file (say, a CD) into a 128k MP3 file and into a 128k WMA file, the WMA would sound better, because its a better, newer codec.
Here are some samples:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...p3/default.htm
Originally Posted by leeren:
“NEVER AGAIN will i use WMA ... and just for the record i HATE the way alot of video clips on the web are WMV ... what an awful choice of codec!”
The latest version of WMV is called VC-1, and is a codec used for HD DVD/Blu-ray movies. Its just as good as MPEG-4 AVC when done properly, however the only encoder that actually supports the "full" spec, only runs on 64bit CPUs with a 64bit operating system (very uncommon).
The videos you see on the internet are usually encoded in WMV7/WMV8 at unacceptably low bitrates, with the preference set to 'speed' rather than 'quality'.
-Chris