Hi,

I have a Pioneer Inno XM Radio which is my favorite portable. It has 500 MB of storarge and I would like to rip 15 favorite albums on to it. I can do this with 64 mbp/s wma. This player can only do wma 9.2 and mp3, so I guess wma would be the best choice? If we assume it is, should I use 2 pass encoding?

//C

I have no idea if this reply is useful since it have been over 1 year but but.....
I just feel like replying since no one has.haha....

yeah... when using bitrates below 128kbps, it should be better to use wma.
64kbps 2 pass vbr should give you slightly better quality than 64kbps cbr
and wma vbr quality 25. (this from my experience...)
you should be satisfied with the audio quality produced (64kbps 2 pass vbr) if you're not a fussy one.
but, using 2-pass vbr also produces bigger filesize compared to cbr (just slightly, most of the time...)
and much bigger compared to quality vbr.

i'm not sure if using 64kbps 2-pass vbr would enable you to fit all 15 albums into a 500mb player but it all depends on number of track (if less than 240 tracks should be okay) and the duration of the songs. (average 4 mins is okay).

in NeroAAC, 2-pass ABR doesn't affect quality, but bitrate. So in WMA it should be the same technique - you'd probably gain a little bit smaller filesizes, but be aware that 2-pass encoding affects double conversion time.

I compared once twopass and non-twopass encodings and noticed a bitrate difference of about 5 - 10 kbps.