lossless format

[Mike Williams]

Wow. Little did I know my little post would generate two weeks of repartee.
Good for me, though; I'm learning a lot. Sounds to me (sorry, Craig) that
L-WMA is a good option as far as space and quality goes, but I have a couple
of concerns. I have heard a lot about WMP10 having its way with the metadata
attached to the songs, i.e., losing the tags, rewriting the tags, etc.

Yes, I'm probably head of the line to criticise WMP's handling of
metadata in versions 9 and 10 [1]. That's not a fault of the
file-format, but of the player design and implementation. The potential
for loss or overwriting of metadata exists with both MP3 and WMA. If
you've annotated WAV or MIDI files in the library, then you may get a
shock when it's all lost[2] after a player upgrade, as these formats
have no internal store for the tags/metadata.

When I have my tags updated properly and album art squared away, I make
an offline backup of all the files, including album-art. You can make
the local copies read-only if it makes you feel safer. I also check that
the tags have been written to the files - there are some problems with
WMP doing this reliably.

Also, how big an issue is compatibility insofar as playing WMAs on

"regular" CD players.

Regular (older stereo or car) CD players can only play AUDIO CDs. Newer
players are very likely to handle MP3, with WMA running second in those
stakes. WAV support is variable, but since you don't get much space
advantage from having WAV files on a DATA CD over simply having an AUDIO
CD then it's a lesser issue. My car has an integrated CD-player without
data-CD support, so I only burn AUDIO CDs. I don't use WMP for burning
since it puts a 2-second gap between all tracks. That's likely to be
true under the next version of WMP as well.

My own practice is to:

* rip all my CDs to Lossless WMA for archiving and subsequent creation
of any AUDIO CDs. I update all the metadata and album-art and place it
out of reach of ANY media-management software: WMP, iTunes, etc. I have
roughly 3 sets of archives in addition to the CD originals. It took me
several years to rip all of my CDs thus, and the cost of a few
hard-drives is a lot less than my time. I had to re-rip several hundred
CDs when WMP9 overwrote or deleted many of my files within hours of
being installed.

* I keep lower bitrate (160-192, lower for spoken-word) files on my
local computer and for use on portable devices. Portable devices rarely
handle bitrates over 320, so lossless or variable bitrate files are
eliminated from consideration.

- Mike

[1] See posts and articles in my tech blog: http://msmvps.com/thinice
[2] not passed onto the new database.

 

[Guest]

Chuck

No apology necessary, we are all here to learn.
After speaking to Zach, Unfrosted and Galen I went home and tried to
convert a couple of WaV files to lossless WMA, I got theunable to copy the
meta tag stuff and then when I played back, maybe it is suppose to 100% but I
did not like the sound, the vloumn was lower and the crispness was gone. I am
here to today to find out what happen. The info I got from Zach and Unfrosted
was outstanding and I thought maybe lossless was the way to go for I would
open gigabytes of hd space, but what happened during my audio file
conversion????
Until I find out, I am sticking with WAV, one possibility is that I need
to save it from vinyl to lossless and not to wav first and will try that next
weekend.

 

[Guest]

Chuck

I wanted to mention to you and whoever, I converted using a Creative Labs
Audio File Conversion and NOT MMP10, I then played the NEW Lossless WMA file
in MMP10 as I played the exact same song in WAV format using wimamp pro and
Musicmatch 10, I would switch between the players and without any question
the WAV file sounded better in both other players then the Lossless WMA did
on MMP!).
I have no clue why and did everything as it was explained. All EQ settings
were flat and no filters etc were used, that is why I used two different
outside players with the WAV file. The volumn on the WMA dropped at least 5
decibels and at times even more, the frequency response ( I know we are
talking data here) seemed to have lost the higher frequencies. It was like it
was clipped and the crispness went from BRIGHT to DULL. So my question to
everyone is if Lossless WMA is 100% lossless then why was there a change in
the sound.
Chuck, try it yourself so I am not the only one sounding like a whacko
here. Analog I knew what I was dealing with when it came to tape speeds,
saturation levels, wow & flutter, frequency repsonsives of the recording
equipment etc, but it was stated that digitial is using DATA and not
reproducing sound and that is why i can be 100% lossles, OK! I fully
understood that, so why the sound difference? was it in the compression and
brillance was in the other 26 mega byte that wasn't in the lossless WMA
file??????

 

[zachd [MSFT]]

Note that you're playing with different players, which skews any comparision
to the point of pretty much being useless. You have to use the same player,
and even then they may parse the sound differently.

Did you turn off the sound modifiers from WMP? Turn off the EQ, Quiet Mode,
and SRSWowSound in WMP- underWMP's View:Enhancements.

If PCM WAV and Lossless WMA sound different in WMP than in other players,
that's different. It's likely that WMP is using DSound, which on some sound
cards produces a slightly softer audio. You can switch WMP to use waveOut-
http://zachd.com/pss/pss.html#dsound

Aaaaaaaaaaaanyways, that's about all I have to say here. It is
mathematically lossless, so while playback nuances may occur depending upon
how you play it back (and the above should remove those differences), it's
not really of particular interest to me vs attending to other people and
issues. I believe you've got good information go on now. Cheers. =)

-Zach

 

[Guest]

Hi Mike and Craig,
How long have you guys been married?