I keep hearing that WMA is a bad codec... how true is this? Why?

Does it matter if I'm aiming at 160 - 200 bitrates?

People are gonna chime in with a lot of answers, but alot of has to do with bad marketing by MS. Basically making claims of "CD Quality at 64kbps."

Another reason is format portability and closed source.

- It is not very good a lower bitrates. Just look at the various listening tests conduced here (which are blind). Maybe your bitrate is OK, but people over here generally want lower rate for obvious reasons.

- Not open source

- Not cross-platform. No binaries for Linux or Mac

- You are at a whim of Microsoft

A bit of search would answer this and probably more.

vevy wrong

Nothing is wrong with WMA if you like WMP 10 and use a "Plays for Sure" portable. It's quality is very similar to MP3 at 128 although slightly behind the best implementation of LAME with the V5 preset. It is also slightly inferior to AAC and OGG per Roberto's listening test.

At 192 and above, unless you have trained ears or great hearing , you are not likely to notice artifacts.

Having said that, people here do not like it becuase it's Microsoft. They view WMA acceptance as M$ eventually squashing digital audio.

Why not use MP3 though? WMA has no advantage over MP3

I was just looking for a codec that would give the same quality as the lame -aps but at a lower bitrate. I was under the impression that wma was better than mp3...

I like ogg, but it's not as compatible, and tends to wear my battery out more quickly.

I'd try AAC, but my player doesn't support it.

all I really care about is the sound quality/bitrate and compatibility, not who makes it.

but all advice and info is welcome. I did try searching, but all I found was people talking about lower bitrates (below 128) and the fact that it is M$.

For a user WMA really doesn't offer anything that MP3 doesn't, apart from perhaps acceptable quality at sub-128 bitrates.

And, besides Triza's excellent list of arguments, i don't think it's been publicly tested as extensively as LAME and the other common formats on HA have been. So at a bitrate of 192 you can't be as sure of how your encode will sound as you could be with Lame 3.90 for example. Not that it is very likely WMA has severe flaws or weak points, but still.

Does anyone know if WMA is gapless? I don't expect it to and it is probably a moot point if your player doesn't support it. I couldn't find the information in the wiki. Tagging WMA's may not be as easy as tagging the other formats, too.

Try testing OGG at various bitrates and pick the lowest that still sounds good to you. Besides more capacity lower bitrates also tend to increase battery life.

The thing is ... why would i use it? it would have ti give such a better experience, when compared with MP3 (the general standard), or AAC (MP4, iTunes Standard). Problem is:

- Is not better than MP3/AAC, not even by a thin marging
- The implementation is closed
- Microsoft is bad for competition

so, then again, why would people us it?

- cause it is included by default in WMP, and people tend to use whatever cames with their PCs.

WMA, by virtue of its imprecise tuning and annoying manner of artifacting, probably never reaches a "safe" level of perceptual transparency like MPC or AAC. That's why I dislike it. When I was on Windows and had a flash player, I tried playing around with WMA9, both CBR and VBR, and couldn't get rid of annoying ringing artifacts on a handful of songs, even at high bitrates! WMA Pro seems to scale better, but it's not supported by any portable that I know of.

Indeed. Windows Media Player is available for Macs, and there are third party solutions which allow you to export from QuickTime to Windows Media formats. However Windows Media DRM doesn't work in the Mac port.

I don't like WMA because it was easy to ABX vbr encodings at all but the highest level the encoder would go. If it can't do high bitrates very well, there is little hope for low bitrates. I ended up going with OGG for my portable and am very happy with the quality.

rjamorim's 128kbps comparison results:



does anyone need to say more?

that about sums it up.

thanks!

All codecs except wma have evolved since that test.

Well, that test used WMA 9.0 and MS claims to have done some tuning on the "noise measurement" for version 9.1. See this thread:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....037&mode=linear

I think WMA Pro is the true competitor from Microsoft. It's just too bad that there's no portable player support (yet).

I still would never use a closed-implementation codec. And I think most people here wouldn't also.

That is what is so wrong about WMA.
It could even achieve perceptual transparency at 64k, but I would never use it for serious archiving.

So I think WMA Pro will suffer the same fate.

BTW, does WMA support ReplayGain tags on foobar2000? (Just curious)

And not only that, but WMP is not so great on OS X, from the non-standard installer, to the ugly UI, to the bugginess.

But more the point, why I think WMA is "so bad," or at least why it has never been promoted heavily on these forums, and why I originally never saw fit to make a forum for it:

- It was never a format that people initially discussed around here much. There wasn't much community interest from the initial regulars.

- Player support has always been a bit shaky when not using Microsoft products. I'd venture to guess that WMP is not the most popular player with the people on these forums. (This is a little different on DAP's, since standard WMA has good support there for the most part, but DAP users represent probably still the minority of the people on HA).

- It has not had a very good track record for portability (though this may have been changing with 3rd party playback libraries becoming available).

- It has never had the most compelling sound quality (WMA Pro is a bit different, but suffers from most of the other points to an even higher degree -- i.e., it's less accessible)

- There's never been serious interaction with the HA community from a WMA developer. Just about every other format promoted here has had this, and this characteristic is a rather integral part of what makes HA unique.

- The tie WMA has to DRM scares many people away from the format here. Many of the people on HA like to have flexibility with their audio files, including copying them to different machines and being able to process them with a variety of different tools. They want to be able to do this without the kind of restriction that DRM brings with it. Of course other formats like MP4 can have DRM too (see iTMS), but in the overall scheme it seems to be less of an issue in these other cases since there is no single company (a company which, I might add, many people are suspicious of) in charge of the way in which the DRM is handled. Furthermore, there have been at least a handful of posts by users on HA over the years that have managed to lock themselves out of their collection by not being careful about WMA DRM.

- The format is not well documented in comparison to the others, which makes creating 3rd party utilities to process it much more difficult. Maybe this is a little bit different now that a 3rd party playback library has been created, but even so, the format is not open in a way that makes it accessible to developers that do not either license technology from Microsoft, or rely on Microsoft provided libraries (which are usually non-portable and not open for modification).

If you ask me, WMA simply isn't a format that sits well with the spirit of HA given the above disadvantages. Does that make it "so bad"? Well, it depends. It makes it not very good as a format for HA to promote. But on an individual basis, if someone just wants a format to encode their files to so they can upload to their DAP, well, then no it doesn't necessarily make it "so bad." But depending on the aim of the person (say quality), it still might not be their best choice (assuming they have other options).

Well said, Dibrom. a fair and objective response.

That's the only wma file on my computer, and I could replaygain it without any problem with Foobar.

Of course RG is just a metadata field like TITLE or ARTIST, so practically every format that supports some way of tagging can use it with Foobar, even formats that natively do not support it.

Like all other said
WMA is a bad codec because:

- The implementation is closed.
- No Cross-platform.
- Is NOT better than MP3.
- It supports DRM.
- Claim something that is not true: "64kbps = CD quality".
- And my favorite is because is from Micro$oft.

If you don´t care that is from M$ and the only thing you care is find a codec that is better than MP3, well WMA is NOT that codec...
if your DAP don´t support Ogg Vorbis or AAC then use MP3... because WMA is not a good choice for all that reasons.

Edit: Bad performance.

OK, just to balance some of the obvious bias against WMA in this thread (and the painful displays of childness with writings of "Micro$oft" and "M$"), here's an advantage of WMA over MP3: Native gapless support.

The OP asked about 160-200 kbps range. Are you aware of some tests that prove that WMA is bad "even at high bitrate"? If so, please share with the group.

Unfortunately I've had issues with multiple artists and WMA files in Foobar after editing tags. Otherwise WMA ain't so bad, I guess.

Perhaps, but few software players and even fewer (if any?) hardware players can play back WMA gaplessly. With most hardware players, it doesn't matter what format you feed it; there will be gaps regardless.

I don't know of any official test. However when I first decided to go digital I examined MusicMatch MP3 and Microsoft WMA to find out at what bitrate each codec would be transparent.

Microsoft stated that 64 kbps was CD-quality and I was horrified how bad my music sounded at that bitrate. Very artificial, metalic/robotic sound that distorted even vocals.

I used Supertramp - School for an intensive comparison between the bitrates. No matter how high I went in bitrate for WMA I could still hear ringing.

Although the ringing artifact got less and less obvious, its metalic sound made me shiver, almost as if I had now become allergic to WMA and just the slightest metalic artifact would cause a reaction.

I was very disappointed by Microsoft as a company that they could make such a blatent lie that 64 kbps was CD quality. Never really trusted Microsoft ever since.

I ended up chosing MusicMatch 320 kbps...

Now this is my personal experience with WMA and I don't have fine reports proving that I can actually ABX the samples. This was way back, before I was introduced to HA and ABX testing.

Anyway, Microsoft still claims 64 kbps is CD quality...

I have two Rio Karmas, both with the latest firware, and neither will play WMA gapless no matter what. LAME MP3's are ok for the most part (occasional gaps), and OGG Vorbis plays back gapless perfectly. This and the great quality is why I use Vorbis exclusively now, and will likely play a big role in my future DAP buying decisions.


I've done my own ABX testing. I would start at a low bitrate and work my way up until I could not hear artifacts anymore. In every case, the only artifact free bitrates were those in the 400kbps range (VBR, non-pro) if I remember correctly. I was shocked. Of course, this only applies to my hearing (which I don't think is particularly special), and everyone is different, so one would have to try for themselves to see.

OK. maybe is not so bad at that bitrate, I mean that "compared with other codecs" (like Vorbis or MPC) is not the best... sorry but I don´t have some tests that prove that... that is based on that MP3 is better than WMA at 128kbps so what big diference would have have WMA at 160-200kbps vs MP3 at the same bitrate?
But I will make some personal test and if I´m wrong I accept it...

Ogg is a container, Vorbis is the format.

Wasn't there a thread a year or more ago where someone did analysis of decoded WMA & MP3 and found the WMA had higher levels of bass? As if there was a bit of EQ being applied, though the decoding software was set to flat. I say that's bad. It's not true to the original sound, and it's not transparent.

Though I can't remember if it was ever proven if the bass thing was the fault of the WMA codec itself or just that something MS's playback software does to all WMA.

I've found that WMA is acceptable if you're intent on compressing audio files as much as possible to fit on an MP3/WMA player with very limited storage.

I would never dream of using WMA for my CD collection, since I've got 20 GB to save my tracks on, my sister has only got 512 MB, so I used WMA 96kbps and checked to see if any tracks played back with any extra distortion (sometimes the drums echo at that bitrate), and those tracks I re-encoded at MP3 128kbps.

For voice recording and spoken word, WMA 20kbps (Mono) was superior to MP3 32kbps, and for many higher bitrates it would just be daft to encode so highly.

Benefit of WMA: Handles low bitrates better than MP3, so only consider this if you want to sacrifice a little quality for the sake of saving space.

I don't understand all the negative comments regarding wma. I have just finished comparing standard wma at normal vbr against Lame Mp3 at normal/high vbr. I changed both files to wav and compared to the original song as a wav file. It was ABX wav to wav. I honestly could not tell any difference between the MP3 or the WMA. They both sounded like the original to me. If there was a difference, it would only be in the range of the 'slightest' change. In other words, I don't thin kit matters what a person uses. I'm using WMA due to the fact that the file size is much smaller than the comparable MP3. I have a 40gig mp3 player and have 650 records. I I use MP3, I would have to buy a 60gig mp3 player. Since I can't hear a difference, I'll use WMA. That's my opinion

How could it be any smaller? You just set the average bitrate lower with WMA than MP3. Do the same with mp3 and you'll have files as small. Voila! Try it and I bet you can't tell the difference.

I am sure wma outperforms mp3 at 64k,but I heard that mp3 outperformed wma above 192 , is it true? Recently, I'm thinking over making mp3 with EAC instead of making wma with WMP 10 .

actually also the results from guru's test at ~80kbps should be posted here:



wma9 provided slightly less or the same quality than lame mp3 on classical samples and was slightly better on various music styles

read about the whole comparison here

WMA may have quality as good as OGG Vorbis but it suxx cos there are always some problems with playing it With mp3, ogg and mpc I never had any problems!

Quality of WMA @ 64kbps is much better and I dont know what about higher bitrates cos I haven't done comparsion (wma is problematic so it's nothing I would use for storage)

anyway, we have grat OGG Vorbis, MPC Musepack and MP3 that is popular as it is so who cares about wma ?

WMA seems ok as an alternative to the lo-fi mp3's for portable use, but on the system at home I can still hear jingling noises at the best it can do on occasions. Sure, I can use WMA lossless, but my iriver wont do it, and I cant seem to get anything to encode into the WMA 9.1 formats to try them, and I think the iriver wont do that either.

Best to just forget it and move along, there are better formats, or use MP3 for compatibility with everything under the sun. WMA was best at sub 96 bitrates, but recent tests I did with lame show its come a long way since I last tried that low a few years back.

I used to think that WMA at +/- 96 kbps VBR was best for using on flash mp3 players with small volumes (128 MB, 256 MB) but now that I've tried LAME 3.97b1 with --vbr-new -V8 setting, I must admit that I prefer mp3. The squishy noises you get with WMA are simply not there with this LAME setting and the mp3's still sound "bright" despite of the low sampling rate. You get files ranging about 70-100 kbps (I think someone actually measured all that and published a table in this forum) and the artefacts aren't as annoying as WMA artefacts imho.
Congrats for the LAME developers !

well, every one except atrac3...

At least WMA Pro is competitive with AAC and Vorbis. Or rather, it was 2 years ago, and I don't recall progress being made. So it might now be a bit worse.

The problem seems to be that Microsoft had problems "pushing" hardware manufacturers into supporting it. This while almost everything seems to support basic WMA, which sucks.

I don't doubt that Microsoft *can* actually produce a kickass format. Some of the people who basically invented audio coding work for them nowdays. I am sure they are not there just to twiddle their fingers, so I would not be surprised if Microsoft can drop something good onto the world in the future.

Of course, it will be a closed format again, and hence, very uninteresting.

I use the WMA VBR q25 on my portable. It's decent for listening to music while running. I read that WMA uses less battery life too, but that may be only CBR

I have ran into a few artifacts, but very rare. I have this one song where it repeats a half second of the audio...

OK, uncle...uncle...UNCLE!!!!

You've convinced me! I have a fair bit of music in wma (though almost entirely without DRM). I'm going to re-rip into mp3. Now, I'm guessing that WMP10 is pathetic in its mp3 ripping capabilities and I'm sure I'll go ahead and branch out into another media player. So, I'm going to look around the forums for info on best way to encode mp3 - sounds like it's Lame but most of the tutorials I've found are for Lame 3.90 and from reading this thread, it sounds like several improvements have been made in the newer 3.97 version. Any links to a tutorial for best Lame ripping etc. for the newer versions would be most appreciated.

Another wma user bites the dust...

many thanks to you!

This really is the paradox of Microsoft. This same sort of situation exists in other areas.

They have a lot of very smart people working for them -- often times the brightest in their particular field, yet when Microsoft releases some work relating to that field, it's often lackluster. It kind of makes you scratch your head and wonder wtf.

One other area that comes to mind as an example would be languages. They have a bunch of smart language researchers working for them, such as Simon Peyton Jones, Simon Marlow and others, but then they release crap like C# and VB.NET. This while F# and SML.NET basically languish in obscurity, and the Simons' Haskell work remains completely untapped (AFAIK).

*sigh*...

You can use the same guides as for Lame 3.90.3. When you download Lame, it comes in a zip package, just extract the lame.exe file. It is the same procedures but instead of downloading Lame 3.90.3, download Lame 3.97b1. You can also look around here as the command schemes for Lame 3.97b1 have changed. Instead of typing in --alt-preset standard you will type in -V 2 --vbr-new Here is the pinned thread about the recomended Lame settings:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=28124

I'm actually a WMA fan (see my signature for details). WMP 10's never failed to rip a CD properly for me unless it's copy protected, in which case I use EAC + WME 9. In all my WMP ripping experience, I've experienced only 1 artifact. I've done listening tests vs. MP3 myself and prefer 9.1 overall for my personal ripping purposes (those are the only two compressed formats my MP3 player supports, and I'd rather not lose quality and time by transcoding). Otherwise my only rules are a 160 kbps minimum for MP3 (I find 128 in that format to be universally atrocious, but VBR efficiency is great), and 128 kbps minimum for AAC, MP3 and OGG format. MPC's also really good, but my experience with it is limited to one CD of songs I obtained.

A small comment on this considering the context:

I think it's unfortunate that people are being asked to use --vbr-new. I guess it's no real surprise to anyone that I disagree with the LAME developers on how to handle commandline switches, and that I still feel that the LAME frontend is very poorly designed (at least, the last time I used it, it was), but I really think that this is a step backwards from the presents we used to be endorsing. -V2 is fine, but -V2 --vbr-new is not. Part of this is because the switch is poorly named and completely uninformative (e.g., a user would wonder what exactly is special about it, other than that it is "new"), and part of it is because it moves back to the approach of adding extra commandline switches to change internal codec behavior in a subtle way that is not obvious to most users (which, incidentally, is what the alt-presets tried to eliminate).

If --vbr-new is to be recommended, and I assume that it's only attained this status through testing and approval from many interested parties, then it should simply be defaulted. If there is a need to retain the same behavior with the alt presets as with previous releases, then --vbr-old should be appended to the internal configuration for these presets.

If it is simply uncertain as to whether --vbr-new is truly better than --vbr-old, and this is why it isn't completely defaulted, then one has to ask why it is being recommended, and why there hasn't been more work done to resolve whatever ambiguity there is in that regard before going ahead with the recommendation.

Anyway, just an observation from someone who had a bit of interest in creating the old presets...

Thus far I've not commented on current LAME issues, but this one has been bugging me, and this time I couldn't resist.

This is my pure speculation but it might be true - field of digital audio compression is literally filled with patents. Most of them actually do not belong to Microsoft.

Now, when it comes to worldwide standard codecs (e.g. G.729, MP3, AAC) - companies wishing to participate as essential patent holders are required to grant their IPR on a fair and non-discriminatory basis to everyone.

In case of proprietary codec, such as WMA - I don't think nobody is obliged to license Microsoft anything when it comes to IPRs - at least not for a "fair and reasonable" price. This means that including many perceptual tools found in, say, HE-AAC v2 - would need cross-licensing and tough negotiations with many parties.

That would potentially drive up the price of WMA licensing, probably to the extent Microsoft would not desire. And therefore - before adding anything too advanced and new, they most likely have to go through many negotiations and legal steps.

Sometimes being open has more advantages

Well, yeah, how about using a new WMA-Pro encoder and trying that again?

Or even a V10 WMA encoder. Let's know exactly what apples we're comparing here, what say?

And, WMA has evolved. Time for a visit to your friendly power tools site.