I have decided to encode my CD collection into WMA9 Lossless, for various reasons. However, before i finally do it, i would like to know what the options for portable players, should i want to buy one in the future, are.
For instance, at the moment, i can't find an HDD based player which supports WMA9 Pro/Lossless. If no such thing exists, will WMPlayer 9 automatically encode from WMA9 Pro/Lossless to WMA9 at 192kbits or something similar to use on theo the portable device?. I dont want to be in the situation where i have a tonne of lossless audio and no easy, one click way to get it onto a portable player.

Any help would be much appreciated.

at the moment I can't think of any portable player that supports wma9 Lossless. However this should change in near future. I also encode my music with wma9 Lossless. If you transfer a wma9 Lossless file to a portable player that doesn't support it, the file is re-encoded automatically (whatever bitrate you chose in your settings). I hope that helps

thanks, thats what i needed to know. I will go ahead with the lossless encode if it can transcode on the fly when copying to portable units.

What software are you referring to that does this automatic re-encoding?

I use Flac on Mac OS X, so my experience isn't directly applicable but I store all my music in both Flac and 128kbps AAC for use on my iPod.

Now it would be nice in theory if I only stored Flac copies of my music and iTunes transcoded the files to AAC when it transferred them to the iPod but I estimate that it would take take a couple of days to convert all the songs on my 15GB iPod (5x realtime encoding for 10 days worth of music).

how about WMA Pro (the one in Windows Media Encoder), is that supported by any portable?

If you use WMP to transfer WM9LSL files to a portable player, it uses the WM9STD settings as set up in WMP - which would be WMA9STD in the case of WMP9.

I'd suggest to either use the Windows Media 9 Encoder to convert to WMA9STD for portable players, as this can be easily run in a background operation. There is a separate WMA9LSL util for WMA9LSL-WAV lossless conversion.

As for portable player support - who knows?

As a matter of interest, the iMP-250 with an early 2.xx firmware would partially decode LSL, with the excessive bitrate encoded frames causing blips. I think it was 2.10 that happened with, as i believe it was from the revised 2.20 onwards firmware that fudge got kicked out.

Pro, as a variant, has virtually no benefit to even hope for in portable player terms. I mean, seriously, unless a portable player provides multi-channel (i.e. 'n.1' type) support there is little point in anyone encoding that way.

Anyway - that's all folks, as this tomcat-spirt has an appointment with distruction testing an ATRAC CDP ;oP</p>
'Tom Kat'

according to this listening test conducted not long ago:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=11936

and it's pretest discussion, Pro was chosed since it was superior in quality (stereo not surround) to wma std.

I contacted RCA and SonicBlue (Rio) and neither currently support WMA9 Pro. Only WMA9. Will they in the future? Who knows.

WMP transcodes from WMA Pro or WMA Lossless to WMA at 128 kbps as it sends files to portables.

I was talking about Windows Media Player (WMP). Whenever you transfer a Wma9 Lossless or Wma9 Pro encoded file to your portable player you can have it automatically re-encoded while transferring. In WMP player, you can choose the bitrate but also between vbr and cbr mode. I think pretty much every portable player supports vbr wma so this is what I always choose. In near future most of the portable players might be able to play wma9 Pro files back, so you don't have to necessarily transcode your Wma9 Pro files and then you might be able to re-encode your Wma9 Lossless files to wma9 Pro while transferring.

Anyway, I like Wma9 Lossless a lot. It performs faster and with a better compression rate than FLAC files, at least this was the result of my little test . However, these were only slightly differences, but people don't need to install another plug-in or something since they have WMP anyway. And the fact that I have a portable player makes Wm9 Lossless to a clear winner for me

How do you get it to transcode with VBR? WMP automatically transcodes all my files to 128 CBR unless they are encoded with 128 VBR or less in the first place. 128 CBR is the 'ceiling'. For example, my WMA9 lossless and WMA9 192 VBR automatically transcode at 128 CBR even though I do not desire this in the case of the 192 VBR.

That's why I use Sveta portable audio. It transers 'as is'.

Thanks all for the comments. In answer to the question above, unfortunatly i dont have WMP9 on this machine (at a friends place), but iirc, bring up the windows media player options tabset. Then select the device tab, or similar. You should see your player listed, if its plugged in. If so, bring up its properties, and you should be able to select the copy quality.

Make sure and read this thread first:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....opic=11853&st=0

Josh

Thanks for the link to that thread, i have read and understood. I decided to go with WMA for various reasons, perhaps a little different from the normal. Firstly, after years of tweaking, customising, and fiddling and overclocking, now, i just want stuff to work, out the box, one click. I was also interested in experiencing the full on 'XP experience', out of curiosity, and amazingly it turned out to be very enjoyable. I also have a tonne of Japanese CD's (i live in Japan), and hence i need a player, database, and format the correctly supports not only UTF, but the old JIS, Shift-JIS, and EUC character formats. The japanese edition XP does this fine, even from a command window. Hence, so does the japanese WMP9 edition and related components. For indexing my music, the Japanese edition of WMP9 has successfully retirieved every single CD i have tested it with, which has been over 100 so far. Hence, it saves a lot of typing.
I guess, im after a different experience now, i want my music on demand, at the click of a button, indexed, rated, ordered, and integrated. Hence WMP9 is the way to go, for me at least.

get the newest release and take a look at the options...