Why the low popularity/usage of WMA Lossless? (according to the poll), Split from: 2012 ripping/encoding poll Options

[HTS]

What's so bad about WMAL?

[Mach-X]

There's nothing wrong with wmal, or wma in general for that matter. Unlike other users, I don't discriminate against apple or microsoft or open source. (although I really hate apple, but don't rip people who choose to use their products). WMAL has one prime raison d'etre. The zune 120. If you are one of the lucky people to have one of these you can take your entire cd collection losslessly on the go with the superior zune interface. That interface is the main reason I still keep a zunehd in my car. I've tried using my rockboxed clip in my car. Do you know how hard it is to drive and navigate that tiny screen? And the zune interface does things no other interface does. One touch shuffle of your entire music collection. One touch artist playback, it plays all their albums from newest to oldest. One touch album playback. Why is it nobody else has this?! Even on my droid phone you can't one touch play an album. You have to long press than press play, rather dangerous to be distracted that length of time. With the zune it's tap the album cover and it plays with a very nice now playing screen. If you are in shuffle mode and you decide you want to hear the album of that track you just tap the cover and it plays the album unshuffled. Nothing compares to zune for on the go interface. It's a shame they discontinued the 120 I would love to buy one and skip lossy encoding altogether.

This post has been edited by Mach-X: Dec 23 2012, 07:27

[DonP]

There's nothing wrong with wmal, or wma in general for that matter. Unlike other users, I don't discriminate against apple or microsoft or open source. (although I really hate apple, but don't rip people who choose to use their products). WMAL has one prime raison d'etre. The zune 120.
...
It's a shame they discontinued the 120 I would love to buy one and skip lossy encoding altogether.

So the best thing about it is it only works (wrt portables) on a player you can't get?

SPeaking of Zune, we're getting close to that special time when they freak out on the 366th day of the year.
Did Msoft ever give a firmware update on that, or did they figure no one would keep a player until the next leap year?