Have a look here.

Extremetech have given reasons why they consider wma to be the best codec, as opposed to iTunes. The main problem (among many with the article) is that the reviewer is hung up on the bit rate, thinking 128kbit aac is automatically going to be worse than a higher bittrate wma file. They've also completely ignored any other codecs, or indeed decent implementations of .mp3.

yes I know wma has good hardware support, else i'd bitch about musepack not being included. But i've heard better sounding mp3 players than the iPod. It's not exactly an enlightening article is it?

There seems to be a sort of anti WMA bias at HA. After all, WMA pro did well in Roberto's 128K extension test, but it gets little mention around here.

I thought a lot of portable support WMA. Does that include WMA pro?

Perhaps its just that we all love to hate MS.

Not at all.

I have written and designed Windows systems since I was 17, 14 years ago. I appreciate Linux etc, but I also appreciate the quality of http://msdn.microsoft.com . I used to encode in wma myself, until I found vqf, believed the hype, then investigated better codecs

It's just that the article seems to consider aac vs wma as the ultimate solutions. They also ignore the fact that wma is a closed system and that some of the wma9 formats (ie lossless) dont work on some players. Compatibility isn't complete there.

It's uninformed at best.

@seanyseansean

Thanks, I was looking for something like that. Is wma pro what comes with media player 9, or is it a separate thing?

Eagleray,

You need to support your statement that wma "gets little mention around here". Do you have some proof? Take a look at TOS #15 while I check out #6...

xen-uno

That article reminds me of a discussion I had with a friend of mine.

We were talking about a new professional digital camera (we are both "oldskool" freelance photographer).
He started claiming that the camera "is big", "is heavy to carry", "batteries last for less than 10 hi-res photos", "this feature is crap" and so on...
Finally he said (after reading the specs of the camera) "Pah, what the hell, even a Compact-Flash!!! I don't need a Compact-Flash built in the camera, I always use an external lamp, blah blah blah, the Compact-Flash will make batteries last even less than 10 photos, blah blah...."

He just doesn't know what a Compact-Flash might be.



In the end: "If you don't know what you're talking about, you should shut up"

While risking another violation of #6, I have to mention there are only 14 points in the TOS

@Xenno

I just checked and only saw 14 terms of service.

Let me clarify my statement about WMA.

Notice that MP3, Vorbis, MPC and AAC each have their own forum, but WMA is grouped in the "Other Lossy" category. Perhaps I shoud have said that considering every new Windows system supports WMA out of the box and it is used for several online music stores (including Walmart), it does not get that much attention around here. Perhaps this is a paradox.

In the commercial world, WMA and AAC are fighting it out right now, and so forth.

LOL@that artice on ExtremeTech. How many uninformed claims it is possible to make in one article??
Either the reviewer really has no knowledge of what is happening, or he was paid by MS. How can he for example say that he doesn't know any consumer AAC encoders supporting multichannel. If you know _any_ you must know at least FAAC and Nero and those have had multichannel for a long time now.... Same with VBR. Actually I think there are more well known consumer AAC encoders supporting also VBR than only CBR, and he knows none.. again, how about FAAC,Nero,Compaact etc..

Too bad that the ExtremeTech reviewer had no knowledge of for example m4p2mp4 software, which converts one's own iTunes DRM protected files, to unprotected mp4 which you can use everywhere. Well of course not most newbie users know about that, but if the site's name is ExtremeTech, you'd expect some deeper knowledge..

The whole topic of the review doesn't make any sense: "iTunes Bad, WMA Good".
The other is a brand of a software and service, the other is an audio codec.
I don't know. There were so many mistakes, that I really don't know what to think of that.
Why anybody does this kind of review if one clearly has no clue at all?

Did he try to search for independent tests (pro or anti-WMA)? Google search: WMA 9 Pro "listening test". Roberto's 128kbps Extension test is the first result.

Read this here.

If that article is so bad....

1) Is anybody here going to take the time to write to him directly and *politely* attempt to educate him?

2) Is anybody going to post in the feedback section of the article, *politely* pointing out the errors, bad assumptions, etc. and suggestion places where readers (and the author) can go to become better educated...?

Didn't think so...!

Maybe, though I think there's an extremely small chance that he fixes the article. Because so much of the article could change completely, it would be totally another review.
That would imply how clueless he was at first, and I doubt these "ExtremeTech" reviewers want to admit that..
Even more, I'm suspicious how can a reviewer of a site like ExtremeTech be _that_ uninformed, unless the review was made like that purposely for one reason or another..

No, and that's the problem really.
WMA 9 Pro is impressive but AFAIK still totally unsupported by portable players.

WMA 9 vanilla does not appear to score nearly as well as HE-AAC or Vorbis at low bitrate (see rjamorim's 64k test), and is apparently inferior to QT AAC and it's own WMA 9 PRO brother (if not LAME), at higher bitrates.

Dibrom's fifth point from the post CiTay linked to sums this up I think:

edited syntax added parenthesis

so you are probably gonna support and recommend WMA to your relatives, helping other part of the industry gets destroyed by MS ANTICOMPETITIVE tactics. I would never ever reconmmend a MS prodcut at the same or less quality than a competing one, simple cause they had allready done much harm (netscape, icq, 123, wordperfect, os2, etc) ... obvsiuly i'm not stupid, and if MS has a really better product, i don'0t mean using it/recommending it, but with ME, ms has to be really superior to be even considered.

hu? Was this supposed to be some kind of joke? I can find no tos#15... Anyway, can you guess the ratio between news here which have "aac" in the title and those with "wma"? My estimation is that it's about 5 times in favour of aac. Which of course probably has a very natural explanation...

since the site in question is so 'professional', their web master will inform the author of the article about the refferals, and one of them is this thread, so it will get automagically educated without the need for doubling the info into some email spam.

Offtopic flamage moved here.

Well, I emailed the guy and posted in his forums and so on. He responded. Mainly, it seems to be that he just doesn't like the DRM in M4P files. The other stuff is a simple matter of not searching very thoroughly. It's not so much that he thinks AAC/MPEG4 sucks, it's that he thinks Fairplay's DRM sucks and that WMA has more player support.

I pointed him to Roberto's listening tests, as well as pointed out that WMA-DRM is, if anything, far more restrictive than Fairplay, as well as pointed out that RealPlayer 10 can playback M4P's as well. In short, I think that he simply hasn't considered iTunes DRM as a "new" contender, which it really is considering that it's only made it to the big platform (Windows) recently.

Basically, he just found out about FairPlay, decided it sucks, and then praised the feature set/sound quality of WMA. AAC was dismissed immediately without much investigation into it.

I was able to get him to admit that MPEG4/AAC != iTunes/Fairplay though. Maybe he'll give it a closer look. In any case, he also says that ExtremeTech is trying to do their own blind testing, which I look forward to seeing.

Edit: I did not point out the lack of player support for WMA9 Pro, mainly because until just now I was not aware of it (I don't use WMA ). If he responds again, I'll bring it up.