My gf just got a Ipod and she says it wont play wma but only mp3. She wants to convert the wma to mp3. I was Just thinking would a simple convert with foobar do it or will it mess up the quality? I know its loosey so its already lost but how can I do it and not lose anything more?

Also a side question to this which does have something to do with this all together.

I dont have a Ipod and I plan on geting something like that in the future. Can you force the Ipod to play other formats like WMA somehow without messing it up. I think she has a Nano 4 gigs if I remember right.

Thanks

Lossy to lossy will always lose quality. iTunes can automatically transcode everything for you, or your best bet is to re-encode it from the original sources.

www.rockbox.org

Doesn't do wma but it does do FLAC, Ogg, WAV, Aiff, Wavepack...and more.

Installed on your ipod, leaving the original firware still accessable and easily removed.

WMA was invented by Microsoft, so Apple will NEVER integrate WMA support into their iPods.


BTW: Why do you even use WMA?

Time to something constructive...

Yes transcoding is lossy, but in general mp3 quality are not quite as good as wma and aac. My advice is to locate Nero Digital AAC encoder in foobar and transcode to aac. No need to put special firmwares on the device - It doesn't solve the main problem, and for christ sake, IT'S A GIRL!

Got any proof of that? Because all the tests lately have shown that at ~128kbps, WMA is one of the worst quality formats, and that MP3 and AAC are statistically the same.

What did you smoke? If AAC had no quality improvements, why would it become so popular? I won't even bother ABX between Lame 3.97 and Nero AAC. AAC is transparant to me at even 48kbit in a test I did recently, and a quick encode with Lame ABR ~80kbit gives me a headache of artifacts!

However, current WMA may not be far better than MP3 - I never tested it, but I've heard 128kbit samples, that would only compare to recent LAME encodes.

I know this is only for the upcoming codec, but worth a read: Nero AAC vs. WMA-Pro

The same reason WMA became "popular" - pushed by monopolistic companies. I'm not denying that technically AAC is an improvement on MP3. However it has not had the same amount of tuning/debugging as LAME, and as yet has not been proven to be of superior quality at "transparent" bitrates, or even at 128kbps. See here for example: http://www.maresweb.de/listening-tests/mf-128-1/results.htm

Perhaps (though ABX results would be required to take your claims seriously). However most people when encoding, even for use on a portable player, do not encode <80kbps.

So AAC has never been finetuned? You should check some posts about recent Nero AAC tests! You are reffering to iTunes AAC encoder - What did iTunes ever finetune? Even their MP3 encoder are known to be seriously bad.

My test rely on Nero AAC, and i've seen other posts here with people using q0.3~64kbit for a portable device when using Nero. But seriously, do some tests before flaming me! If you can do a >80kbit LAME encode, without obvious artifacts, please post your settings - I can't!

I must admit that some files are harder to distinguish up until q0.4 in Nero (In this case Evanescence: My Immortal Band Version), but others (Typically Enigma) I can't distinguish even at q0.2 (compared to the source).

I was unable to produce Lame encoded files with --preset fast medium that I could distinguish. However with ABR80, v6-9 it's easy to tell difference.

I need to train my ears further (i'm not used to AAC artifacts - They seem to be more "smooth" and hard to tell) and make a more serious test to prove this.

But I hold on to my previous statement, that Nero AAC are alot better than MP3 - And very well suited for his transcoding project

Um, iTunes AAC was the highest quality LC-AAC encoder in listening tests for quite some time (though it had a few weird bugs with some songs), though Nero has made great strides in improving its quality recently, so it may not be anymore. Their MP3 encoder sucks, but their AAC encoder does not.


Gee, I dunno, perhaps because it's the default codec in iTunes, and a lot of people have iPods? And a lot of people used encoders besides LAME which may've been crap encoders, so to them, moving to AAC is a huge improvement.


Do AAC at 48kbps and make sure it's LC-AAC, not HE-AAC. HE-AAC will not decode properly on an iPod. For the record, HE-AAC is pretty easy to ABX for me (and I participated in the listenings tests for it, I can back it up) at 48kbps. I've not done any serious ABXing at 64.
And I told you LAME at ~128kbps, not 80. LAME isn't really tuned for anything below about 128kbps (and has no intensity stereo to deal properly with lower bitrates). FhG will probably give you better results.
AAC is better than LAME at lower bitrates (even LC), but at the normal bitrate of 128kbps, it is not (so far).

Nero Digital may have improved since the last listening test, but so has LAME (see LAME 3.98a6).

odyssey, it's hard to believe for me that all those false and unsubstantiated claims are coming from somebody who is already a member for more than 3 years. Have you completely missed all those public listening tests that have been going on here?

Here are a few to get you started:
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/aac128v2/results.html (showing iTunes to be superior to Nero)
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/multiformat128/results.html (showing LAME to be competitive with AAC, WMA to be worse than both)

Other than that, check the listening test results from Guruboolez and the one from Sebastian's public listening test (that krazy linked to).

Hhmm... the listening tests show AAC being just slightly better than LAME at 128 but statistically tied so of comparable quality. AAC is certainly never worse than LAME which your comment may suggest.

AT this bitrate, and with this encoder, you're mentionning High Efficiency AAC - which is indeed far better than LAME and all other MP3 implementations at low bitrate. But the original poster is talking about playback on iPod. The latter doesn't support High Efficiency. Furthermore all the tests performed in the past revealed that HE-AAC at such (low) bitrate isn't really transparent nor suitable for high quality encodings for most people - contrary to MP3 and LC-AAC at ~130 kbps. Your advices are therefore a bit out-of-subject

Of course it's been tuned. LAME has just been around (being heavily tuned) 5 years longer. And of course Itunes is also tuned; the developers just don't post on HA too often.

Dude, I'm not flaming you. Just trying to point out where you seem to have gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick. My settings? -V2 --vbr-new

Thet's not really beyond 80kbit, is it?

Admitted that I don't have a single clue about the difference of profiles in AAC, but that *whatever profile i'm using* is not supported by iPods sounds like a fiasko for a company pushing this format so hard.

But you even agree to me that my "claims" are right, just not suitable because I got confused of the profile-settings, so how can it even be considered a "claim"?

I still have a hard time ABX'ing some of the low-bitrated AAC files, but like I admitted - not all!

So which devices DO support these low-bitrate AAC-files? Hopefully my future SE phone

Back to the original question.
Your girlfriend's Nano can natively play MP3 and AAC (Low Complexity) as lossy formats. You can change the firmware to Rockbox in order to increase the number of supported formats - but such change can be disturbing for some people.

At ~130 kbps, both native formats should be fine. LAME should offer a similar quality to iTunes AAC encoder, and probably Nero Digital and Coding Tech's AAC ones.

If needed, you can try to lower the bitrate in order to put more songs on this device. At lower bitrate AAC should start to be more obviously competitive than LAME. I was pleasantly surprised by Nero Digital AAC at ~90 kbps last time I played with this. It's not quite as good as 130 kbps encodings, some artifacts were clearly audible with a good headphone on a quiet room, but the overall quality was still pretty good on average and I don't expect to be annoyed by such encodings on nomad listening conditions. On a 4 GB Nano you should fit ~70 hours of music encoded at ~130 kbps and ~100 hours with ~90 kbps as average bitrate.
You and your girlfriend should try and see if the quality is suitable for her needs.

Just one note: I can abx Lame V5 on several of my songs, but I was NEVER able to abx Nero aac at 128kbps!
The very old MP3 format has some design flaws (sfb21, block size etc.) and I'm sure that (much newer) AAC codec overcomes all these problems, so I see no reason why MP3 could be better or even the same quality as AAC at the same bitrate (I'm talking about high quality encoders here).

J.M.

MP3 could be subjectively as good as AAC when both are reaching the transparency level. This is what happened during last multiformat listening test. With training some difference should start to appear.
I could myself ABX both formats at 130 kbps, and as showed in the 200 samples listening test I performed last year, MP3 isn't as good (to my ears) as AAC (iTunes at least - Nero Digital changed in the meantime).

guruboolez, would you consider doing a ~short test again with LAME 3.98a6 vs the newest Nero Digital?

Back to the WMA issue, I do wish it was possible to play WMA on an iPod. I've got some WMA files myself that I'd like to play without having to transcode. What would make me happy is a portable player that supported MP3, LC-AAC, HE-AAC, Vorbis and WMA.

I'd rather do a *big* test
But I must first get my main computer back (still in boxes... at 100 km from me).

thanks for replying. I was at school and studying and didnt get a chance to check back. I just talked to my gf she said that I tunes converts them. I dont know what exactly what that means but she claims it does. When I find out more info i'll get back to yea. I always woundered myself if I pods could play other formats. I guess if you wanted you could play flacs since the gigs are going up on the Pods. I wounder how big the gigs are now i'll have to check out

iTunes supports wma. It doesn't play this format, but the software decodes it while importing and automatically encodes the resulting stream into a compatible format (I guess it's AAC).

Then why use iPod?

Name me a portable player that supports al those formats...

I don't use an iPod (though I might be getting one, so I can stick Rockbox on it and use LC-AAC, Vorbis and MP3). I just wish there was a portable that supported -all- those formats. I can always hope Rockbox will add support for them for the iPod or iAudio X5...

If i'm not wrong I think I saw an article somewhere stating that Zune will support AAC - I'm not sure about how many profiles of this mysterious format though.

Zune doesn't support Vorbis anyway...

Who uses Vorbis anyway?

Seriously who is using *all* fileformats available out there? My impression is that people eigher use mp3 for compatibility, flac for lossless, or aac/wma because they were bought off webshops, but all these formats are supported by rockbox (assumed they were stripped off drm).

Maurits asked for a player which supports "MP3, LC-AAC, HE-AAC, Vorbis and WMA", not after people's opinion about this choice. There is consequently no need for you to mention Zune if you know that your answer doesn't correspond to the original question or if the original request doesn't makes sense to you.

To add some fresh elements to your personal culture, there are much more Vorbis users on this board than AAC ones (source). I guess it should explains why people are looking for hardware support for this format.

Then you need to check who asked the original question in this thread, which does not imply that there was a request for vorbis support.

Actually, I don't see (except for HE-AAC) how his request will not be fullfilled by a rockbox firmware.

I'm only telling my opinion? Oh well, then I think that any manufacturer should start providing support for *any* available format.

Seriously you have to choose in this world - Rarely, you don't get everything in one box, especially with people on this forum being so picky about features - I know i'm one of them, but over time i've learnt that I have to deal with it and compromise things.

Edit: Also a nice move to start flaming me for *recommending* a device someone might have overseen?

You don't get my ironic comment to your lame answer before - If people use Vorbis, they would put a rockbox on an ipod or use a Riva. If people use iTunes/AAC they use standard iPod. If people use wma they get a PlaysForSure device. I'm using mp3, and for all the music I buy in other formats, I convert them. Most people inhere would find a way to convert their music to a common usable format.

WMA totally is poor - and when to convert from it I guess the output should be very much horrible. And it is genereally not recommended.

Got proof?