[Stasulos]

Tried to encode my music from CD to wma at 44khz (CD quality) and was shocked by quality loss. Such degree of distorsion and loss of some instruments altogether!!! Don't understand how it could be since CD is 44khz originally.


What sample rate do you use to get quality copies?

 

[CraigInOttawa]

WM9 typically expresses its "quality" in Kbps, not "khz". So if you're recording at 48Kbps, then thats pretty much as poor as it gets. For me, 128Kbps is almost ok portable devices, 192Kbps is better (these seem to be the "portable" WMA formats that will play with just about any player). For home where I have some decent storage available and will be using a PC for playback, I use Windows Media Audio Lossless which varies between 470-940Kbps.


Craig

 

[Stasulos]

Ok, that clears it.


What do I need to download to use Windows Media Audio Lossless in XP Pro? (I am new to ZP Pro)

 

[DougHamm]

Quote:

Originally posted by Stasulos Ok, that clears it. What do I need to download to use Windows Media Audio Lossless in XP Pro? (I am new to ZP Pro)

Hehehehe...sorry for laughing but this thread brightened up my day. FWIW, uncompressed CD audio is 1411kbps, or about thirty times greater than what you accidentally encoded at.


Anyway, if you have Windows Media Player 9 installed you're fine for using WMA Lossless. In fact it's backwards compatible so you'll find most any app that can read Windows Media files will accept your lossless ones as input. This was a big reason why I went this way rather than .ape, etc. - I can easily drag my files into video editors and such without converting them to .wav.


-Doug

 

[amirm]

Quote:

Originally posted by Stasulos What do I need to download to use Windows Media Audio Lossless in XP Pro? (I am new to ZP Pro)

Go to Tools->Options->Copy Music and under "format" drop down, select WMA Lossless. This one is the true lossless (what geos is in, is what comes out). You can also select WMA "variable bit rate" and then slide the control all the way to the right. This one selects the "perceptual lossless" meaning that output is not the same as input, but to 99% of the people, the quality should be the same as the true lossless. In this mode, you get files that half the size of true lossless or even smaller.


Amir

Microsoft