mp3 or wma's?

[Huan]

Which over all is better in sound quality? mp3's or Wma's?? Search on my end says disabled by administrator so I had a bit of a problem looking for older postings..

Thanks!

[zachary80]

WMA at low bitrates, MP3 at higher

[pika2000]

In my experience mp3s still sound good for bitrate as low as 112kbps CBR, or 96kbps VBR. What annoys me about WMA is the "metalic" like distortions under 128kbps. Best thing to do is try yourself encoding a same song to both formats, and hear which one you prefer.

[zachary80]

Originally posted by pika2000
In my experience mp3s still sound good for bitrate as low as 112kbps CBR, or 96kbps VBR. What annoys me about WMA is the "metalic" like distortions under 128kbps. Best thing to do is try yourself encoding a same song to both formats, and hear which one you prefer.

I would consider Mp3 to have the "metalic-like distortions" at an unlistenable level below 192kbps. Same with WMA though.

[Fothermucker]

I encode all my mp3's at 224kbps/44khz. That's what big hard drives are for.

[leukotriene]

LAME 3.90.3 --alt-preset-standard mp3.
Heavily tuned, excellent sound quality with moderate size requirements.
There isn't much point to using any mp3 encoding protocol outside of the LAME alt-presets unless you have a hardware player that won't do VBR.

WMA is not a good choice IMO unless you use WMA 9 PRO (which is distinct from WMA 9), a format that is not supported by any hardware player as yet.

[zombiebeat]

.mp3 definitely

[isocrazy]

Originally posted by Fothermucker
I encode all my mp3's at 224kbps/44khz. That's what big hard drives are for.

VBR owns any standard bitrate cuz it puts quality low when u dont need it and high when they sing so constant bitrate is a thing of the past :) VBR is the plan for the future

[ARN]

what program should i use to rip cds. i found the lame website, but it only had source code. so could someone point me in the right direction, thank you

[Harkamus]

Originally posted by ARN
what program should i use to rip cds. i found the lame website, but it only had source code. so could someone point me in the right direction, thank you

Exact Audio Copy. www.exactaudiocopy.de

[Atreus]

You can try using Razorlame (http://www.dors.de/razorlame/index.php) as a front end for LAME.

[Urraca]

Neither. I encode my CDs in .ogg. In certain cases in .flac. IMO .ogg has much better low-end bass then mp3. It is a free liscensed codec too, unfortunately iPods do not take advantage of it. I hope the next generation ones do though.