First, I did a forum search for "aac wma," but oddly it came back with zero hits (and yes, I selected "All Forums" and "Any Date"), so please don't flame me as I'm sure this has been covered already.

Long story short, I'm trying to decide who deserves my $0.99 more: iTunes with their 122 kbps AAC tracks or MusicMatch with their 160 kbps WMA files.

I went ahead and purchased the same song twice, once from each site, for testing purposes.

The AAC file plays back at 122 kbps, but I understand that bitrate display is tricky for ABR files, so I'll accept on faith that this is really 128 kbps ABR as advertised.

The WMA file is definitely 160 kbps CBR, and the tag info states "WMFSDKVersion: 9.00.00.2980," so I'll assume that means this was encoded with WM9 (as opposed to the older, more frowned upon WM8 or earlier).

According to these listening tests, Quicktime's 129 kbps AAC files are only slightly better than WM9's 128 kbps files. Given that, wouldn't it be safe to assume that in general, one would be better off purchasing 160 kbps WMA files rather than 128 kbps AAC files?

Omni

Disclaimer 1: <removed text> (...so not to violate Rule #8 of the board's ToS)

Disclaimer 2: I know the pat answer will be, "ABX for yourself. Only YOU can decide which sounds best to YOU." But we are talking a buck a download here, so I am looking for people's opinions based on their experience. After all, if we are all meant to just fend for ourselves, there wouldn't be much point to this discussion board, now would there?

Disclaimer 3: I don't care about DRM, portability, or file size issues; I'm only concerned with quality at the moment.



EDIT:

(in additional to and supplemental to the edit made in the above disclaimer) So not to violate Dibrom's stringent Rule #8 of his ToS, let me ask my question in a way which I hope will be deemed politically correct:

Does anyone know of any listening tests, formal or informal, which compare AAC to WMA9 Standard?

A decision on what format to choose should only be drawn if you download several tracks containing e.g. several music styles (electronic, guitar, acoustic etc.) from several artists.

IMO, it would be premature to draw a conclusion based on a one-track-listening-quality only - d/l'ing more tracks in different formats surely is a pain in the moneybag but the only way to determine what suits your needs best.

Offtopic:

I wish these music services would just go for a higher bitrate and full VBR (transparent encodings) or lossless as a possible, additional choice to avoid that customers are forced to ask themselves whether the quality is good enough or not.

At 1 US$ (or €) per single download, you pay much more for a whole album than you'd pay in a given record store so lossless really should be a valid & feasible option here.

Be careful to distinguish WMA9 standard from WMA9 pro.

Pro sounds better than standard at 128 kbit/s in the various listening tests that people have done, including my own (wma9 pro is also the codec featured in the listening test you linked to). I have not compared at higher bitrates.

ff123

In your title, you're talking about wma pro. But in your message, it seems that standard wma (v.9) is the aac competitor.

The listening test at 128 kbps tested wma pro, which is a totally new encoder (slower, better and not compatible with previous wma decoders and therefore hardware players). I fear that your comparison isn't possible if you're really talking about wma9 standard.


EDIT : redundant post... should be deleted.

Yeah, that was kind of my point. With this one track, I couldn't tell the difference, but at $2/listening-test, I am not willing to conduct anymore tests; hence why I came here to seek guidance.

Encode some lossless files/samples or CD tracks with iTunes AAC 128 and any WMA9 standard encoder: you won't have to pay anything

I knew the oft cited listening test uses WM9 Pro, but really have no clue what MusicMatch uses other than version string I cited. I was hoping someone here would educate me.

But for the sake of clarity, let's compare 128 kbps (ABR) AAC to 160 kbps (CBR) WM9 Standard.

In general, if one had to pick one format over the other, which would be better in terms of quality? (Note the "in general" portion of that question, please. )

I know there is no definitive answer to this question, but I have very little practical experience with lossy formats--I always and without exception rip my CD's in either Monkey's APE format or WM9 Lossless format. But now that I finally have broadband and am playing around with these various music services, lossy encoding is being forced upon me. Anyway, given my "novice" status, I was hoping you experts could share your opinions with me about the two formats.




Yours or mine?

Omni

My post was redundant, not yours

Sorry, I haven't compare wma9 at 160 kbps with anything, even on harpsichord

MusicMatch sells WMA standard files. I expect them to be worse than even MP3 at the same bitrates.

I'll conduce a listening test in March comparing AAC vs. WMA std vs. other codecs.



WM9 STD, indeed. Not WM9 pro.

Regards;

Roberto.

Edit: That's my dilemma. If it were a choice between 160 kbps AAC and 160 kbps WMA, than I'd choose AAC without question. But unfortunately, I'm trying to compare 128 kbps AAC to 160 kbps WMA, hence my quandry.




I guess I should do my own research rather than make assumptions, but I don't understand why "WM9 STD" would be so different than "WM9 Pro." I have access to the pro codecs via dBpowerAMP's Music Converter, and sure, I see with them I have many, many more options (2-pass, 5.1, sampling conversion, etc.), but wouldn't the "STD" codec just be a subset of the "Pro" codec? It just doesn't make sense financially for Microsoft to invest resources in two separate and unique codecs.

I mean, one would think that they would invest their resources in the "Pro" version to cater to the A/V industry; and then for the consumer masses, they would just scale it down (remove options). In other words, I would be very interested in seeing a listening test which compared 1-pass 160 kbps WM9 standard to 1-pass 160 kbps pro. Where's the proof that WM9 "standard" is so inferior to all other codecs?




Hey, that's great. Look forward to seeing the results!

Omni

I did a test last year at 128 kbps between standard encoder and the PRO one, and differences were obvious, clearly in favor of PRO version :
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....howtopic=10551&

I did two tests at the same bitrate on classical samples. The first one gave WMAPRO winner against all competitors (including QT AAC, Vorbis, MPC...), and the second shows that WMA standard isn't impressive against other challengers.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/show.php/showtopic/14091
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=16395


WMA and WMAPRO are totally different in quality.

Thanks, guruboolez! That's exactly the type of info I was looking for. (Edit: Well, in regard to WM9 Std vs. WM9 Pro anyway.)

With all these listening tests and other AAC threads, i could jump to quick conclusion. If MP3 needs about 30% more space to achieve same quality as AAC and WMA STD is worse than MP3, so i would say that AAC 128 is better than WMA STD 160. But this is only pure speculation.
Best way to find out the truth is you to do more test with oneself.

I have been wondering the same thing for months. Why would they not dictate that the music sites use Pro vs. standard and release firmware updates for hardware players????

If the codec is already developed, what is the additional cost to MS? They can then refute Apple's claim that they have the best sound quality files to offer.

Good luck trying to find someone at M$ to answer your question.

Firmware upgrade is not always possible: many players don't have this feature. And I'm not sure that all manufacturers will support the cost for developing new firmware on old products.
Then, I suppose that licence for PRO encoder is not the same that for standard version (but I'm maybe wrong). Will Microsoft allow wma->wmapro upgrade for free?

By releasing wma standard files, there are virtually no problems for playback on software and hardware players. I understand both Microsoft and editors to not releasing wmapro files. Music services are young and promising enough for not risking their reputation with incompatibility problems on playback. Sounds fair for me. Even on winamp, you have to modify the preference for playing wmapro... some people won't do this, because they are not used to play with options.

Last but not least, for many people, wma 160 will be OK... that's the most important.

I'd vote for AAC.
With all my disrespect to iTunes AAC (had serious problems with artifacts a couple of times) I'd select it.
I have some WMA files at 160kbps and I'm afraid, they seems to suffer from classical WMA artifacts (void metalic sound).
In my personal tests AAC@128 rarely showed itself badly, while WMA could be a problems even at higher bitrates (it appears, like a song is encoded with old MP3 codec).
It's still a hard choice for you
I'd take AAC if I were you

If it was WMA9 Pro 160kbps against 128kbps QT AAC, i'd have to choose the WMA9 Pro one..

But the case is very different when we're talking about WMA9 Standard.. My choice would then be Quicktime/iTunes AAC 128kbps, without a doubt. QT/iTunes AAC @ 128kbps is actually VERY DAMN good compared to mostly everything else!

Thanks for all the replies.

I've only purchused 10 tracks since starting this thread, but I went ahead and went with AAC.

I still just wish Apple would offer a service for non-iPod users like me. From what I have gathered, Apple uses 128 kbps in order not to fill up the iPod too fast. Well, I have half a terabyte to spare over here on my system, so file size in not too much of a concern to me. If they would offer 192 kpbs AAC files, I would be in heaven.

Omni

To add to this discussion a recent article has popped out.
iTunes bad, WMA good

The guy doesn't like the m4p's DRM limiting the files only to iTunes and iPods (adding recently Real player on authorized PCs ) That is somewhat understandable and defendable, but for him MS's way seems the only solution.

He speaks of the WMA Pro, forgetting to say that (AFAIK) no hardware player support it yet.

Then he goes on license fees... (In a way cheaper is better)

Finally speaks of the Mac. WMA on Mac too. Right, but Macs still don't have access to the WMA stores, not the same implementation yet.

And ultimately sound quality. WMA beats them all.
AAC, MP3, Ogg all compared to WMA v8 quality.

The rest is "iTunes and the iPod don't have anything near 95% market saturation" right, iTunes represents 70% of the legal downloads if I remember well.

One last word ...

Many problems with that article, but doesn't Real's service now offer 192 AACs? At least I think that was the word before it launched. If so that seems the best quality out of the majors.

Not sure this will bring you the joy you want, but Real's Music Store sells its songs in 192 kbps AAC, like blessingx already pointed out. You have to use RealPlayer 10 Beta to play them back. Expecting the usual "OHNO!", RealPlayer is not as bad as some will claim. Please see this thread for some of the improvements in politeness, and how adjust the settings to make it as nice as can be expected. {flames welcome, but please only if you have really tried it, and you have some constructive criticism included}

In my personal opinion it is not good to compare different bit rates for different audio formats. In this case AAC is disadvantaged because you are comparing a WMA file with a higher bit rate than AAC. So you will not get the correct impression for AAC.

It is like saying 256 Kbps MP3 is better than 64 Kbps mp3PRO/WMA/AAC.