Don't be such a pedant kwanbis .. you know I meant " I know, I use it all the time"

exactly ...

What's your point ?
Those listening test results are pointless and not indicative of the quality of WMA 2 pass VBR, only WMA Standard.

Vorbis in any shape or form will not be adpoted by those offering subscription music downloads any time soon...thats what you want isn't it? For Vorbis to take over from MP3 and WMA - in a big way.

The vast majority of portable players support MP3 and WMA only. Until you boffins make it secure - with some kind of DRM support, you can only dream about it becoming an accepted standard.

Feel free to flame away I don't care!


Keithboy - did you install WMP9 and WME9 ?
Are you sure you chose extraction & compression? Press Shift F5 to start the process. It should at the very least try to start the encoder .. if its not set up right you might at least get a wma file of 3 to 4 kb.

They are.

Please explain how a standard one pass encode is equal to a 2 pass VBR encode?

wmapro 2-pass was tested last year. It performs well.

It was a 2 pass vbr encode done with the wma9 standard codec (ie it was not wma pro)

I never mentioned WMA Pro. It seems to me a lot of you don't know or don't want to know too much about WMA.

It's what you're up against. You want to beat it you better know it.

That is all.

[quote=Gabriel,Jun 8 2004, 09:55 AM] [QUOTE]It was a 2 pass vbr encode done with the wma9 standard codec (ie it was not wma pro)[QUOTE] [/quote]
fair enough - but that was not made abundantly clear from the results of the listening tests. It just looks like WMA CBR was used.

You are right, but it was mentionned on the presentation page:
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/multiformat12...esentation.html

Ok you're right . It's interesting though that the average bitrate reported for the WMA files used in the test was 132. There was not much deviation from the 128 base. http://www.rjamorim.com/test/multiformat128/results.html

I very often get a much higher average encoding to wma vbr through EAC. Of a sample of 10 tracks of different musical styles and tempos the bitrate ranging from 128 to 177 the average being somewhere in the region of 145.

Is the EAC WMA 9 encoder tweaked in some way to perform better than the WMP9 encoder --- if that is what was used to create the WMA files for the listening test?

Sorry, I read too fast and in a busy environment. But you talked about VBR 2-pass as something different than WMA standard :


WMA 2pass is WMA standard. "2 pass" is an encoding mode, like VBR OR CBR.


Funny to read it... Did you ever publish or participate to a listening test? I've tested and published the results of WMA std and WMApro compared to other format, based on ~30 samples. And you?

this is a PERSONAL thought, but then again, i veliebe in choice, and for me, at the time being, choice means any non microsoft product ... why? you may ask ... cause it is absolutelly know that microsoft is a company with a incredible monopoly power, and it uses it to kill competition, and the ones that suffer are the consumers, that end with inferior products ... look what happened to Lotus, Borland, Netscape, WordPerfect, Sun, etc ... and competition IS good ... think of AMD vs Inte ... ATI vs nVidia ... DR-DOS vs MS-DOS (at the time) ... so, if you don't want MP3, why don't you go and buy an ipod (AAC), or an iriver, that supports vorbis? ... or even use LAME, which has proven to be an EXELENT encoder ... what do you win by using WMA, instead o MP3? ... if we, users, allow ms to continue to kill the competition, we would end all up with OSes that connect directly to MS and ask for money, fully controlled DRM'd music files, etc, etc ... just what *I* think.

PS: by the way, i use LAME, so i'm not "marketing" Vorbis or iTunes here.

I have an iRiver CD player which has limited Vorbis support - hopefully they will sort out better support soon.

What I gain by using WMA is small files and great sound. I can get on average 20 CD albums on one 700 MB CD-R in WMA. I was getting about 10 -12 on in MP3. See what I mean?

If the LAME or Vorbis developers can offer me comparable file size at similar bitrates I will gladly stop supporting the SCARY EVIL MONSTER Micro$oft !!

The thing is though what difference does "the guy sitting at home ripping CDs" make? How does it benefit the developer whether it be M$ or otherwise when the compression software required is free either way?

yes, i know how you feel ... at the time, i bought an iriver SlimX, cause of the vorbis support ... even if it costed double what a Sony or Panasonic ... i'm still very pissed



what settings are you using for WMA and MP3?

the 64Kbps tests shows this:



sadly, i don't see a LAME 64KBPS there ...

but you don't mention the bitrate you are targeting ... at 128, lame soars



of course it does! look what is happening for example with ICQ ... is loosing share all the time ... why? cause MS bundled MSN Messenger with XP ... ... and yes, i know that ICQ client sucks ... but you get the idea ...