Song format Qs

[NaiLed]

1. What is the difference between mp3 and wma?

2. Which is better?

3. What is a good program to convert between the two?

thanks :turned:

[Mr. Peanuts]

Mp3 is an MPEG codec and WMA is a Windows-developed format. Theyre both compressed but WMAs can be a bit dodgy and tempremental when playing on MP3 players.

I prefer MP3 because they're easier to tag and more widely supported.

To convert between the 2, I drag the song into a program called Acoustica Mixcraft and mix it down to a different format (WAV, OGG, WMA, MP3).

Edit: Mixcraft comes with all the encoders for conversion

[cundor]

wma is used on ordinary audio cd's, right?

[50% Packetloss]

No.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WMA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3

[Kuukunen]

OGG!
http://www.vorbis.com/

There aren't any BIG differences in the quality so I'd go with the open one.

But out of those two, mp3 for sure.

And for a good program, I have to advertise for THE swiss army knife of audio: foobar2000. :P
http://www.foobar2000.org/
It's actually a player (beats Winamp 8-1) but it can be used for conversions too. Well, for MP3 you have to get lame.exe and I think for wma, it's a bit of a hassle, but why would anyone want to convert to wma, anyways? (Out of the box you can convert to eg. wav, ogg, flac and ape)

[NaiLed]

i was thinking of converting to wma because i heard they take up less space (and i might buy a creative zen and i have over 20gb of music already)

thanks guys! (i'll just stick with mp3)

[Jeansi]

wma is used on ordinary audio cd's, right?

that would be wav.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wav

[Kuukunen]

Well, afaik, it's not really wav. Wav is just uncompressed pulse code modulated audio. So is the audio on CD (44.1 kHz 16-bit stereo PCM), but if you say the format you use on cd is wav, you're a bit wrong. The headers in wav file and the song information in CD is handled differently. It's true that 44.1kHz is probably the most used sampling frequency with wav files, but that's only because the CD is 44.1kHz. Why 44.1kHz? Because that's the theoretical range of what human ear can hear. Well not quite, human ear can hear approximately from 20Hz to 20kHz, but it has to be doubled because of the characteristics of digital signals. It also has some extra, just to make the silly hi-fi people happy. Hope you enjoyed my little lesson. :fear:

[Kuukunen]

i was thinking of converting to wma because i heard they take up less space (and i might buy a creative zen and i have over 20gb of music already)

If you're low on space, you could convert to lower bps mp3s. Yea you lose a bit of sound quality, but if you don't have great headphones and/or ears, you won't hear much of a difference.

Besides, if you convert mp3 to wma, you'll lose quality anyways.

[Emaho]

wma is bigger than mp3 so you wouldnt get less songs with it on your portable player.