I've just got a Pioneer DEH-P7500MP car audio player that supports CDA, MP3 and WMA (not Pro). And i want to start making some good mp3/wma collection cd's from my audio cd's.

I can't decide on what format to use though. I know everyone here will probably say that i should use LAME 3.90.3 -APS, but WMA9 is gapless, and plays gaplessly on the player. I know LAME tags have gapless info, but it doesn't seem like the player supports those tags, since it doesn't play the MP3's gaplessly

I've done some encoding tests between WMA9 Std Q90 VBR (125-215kbps setting in WMP9) and LAME 3.90.3 -APS, and the bitrates are usually almost the same. Usually the WMA9 encoded files are a little bit smaller, average of 5-8mb smaller for a whole album.

Have anyone compared WMA9 Std Q90 VBR against Lame 3.90.3 -APS ? I don't have the most perfect ears and super equipment to ABX such high-bitrate files to be honest.

Is WMA9 Std VBR that much worse than LAME VBR ?

Any advice would be appreciated.

In my personal tests I couldn't hear any difference between WMA9 Std Q90 VBR vs. Lame 3.90.3 -APS.

So, when you'll use these WMA-Files only in your car, and gapless-support is important, take WMA...(encoding in this case will be much faster,too) .




BTW : I'm not a fan of WMA, but in some cases ...

Besides for your car APS is overkill. You have background noise from the road, you're focusing (hopefully) on the road so in your case --preset 128 or a bit higher might be sufficient for listening while driving (or the WMA equivalent of that).

This of course assuming you transcode for your car cd's and not use your original files.