With the most recent release of Windows Media Player 9 I think more people will use it. Well at least I plan on using it. It seems to be a nice integrated all in one product, it's free and when I get a new machine with XP I'll be able to use the lossless encoding.

I know others favour other encoders out there, but hardware compatibility is very high on my list and my DVD player and portable flash player both play WMA files.

I also like the fact that I'll be able to use lossless encoding to store files on my computer but when I transfer these to my portable it will automatically reduce the bit rate for me. Now I haven't tried this feature yet I'm just assuming it will work as Microsoft says it will. Given this is the first version of WMA with this feature I realize this might not be the best assumption.

I realize that many people here don't like Microsoft and other players and encoders have certain advantages over WMA. Still I plan on using WMA as I believe it will become more widespread, though I do hope that WMA9 will eventually play FLAC files as FLAC seems to be getting hardware support for cars. Hardware support for car stereos is also something that's pretty important to me as well.

How do others feel, will enough people use the latest Windows Media Player and WMA files that it a few months time it will justify a separate forum for WMA?

There'll be no WMA forum. Just read what says under Hydrogen Audio: "Cross-platform cross-format psychoacoustic audio compression". WMA != cross platform. The fact that it is also strictly closed doesn't make it any better...

If WMA gets popular enough, I see no reason not to set up a forum should there be demand. We obviously like a format more as it is more open, more crossplatform and better. But WMA is a widely used and popular format, that is supported by many portables. Release 9 also shows it's still actively developed and still improving in quality.

I think the reason why it doesn't get much discussion, and hence doesn't warrant a forum of its own, is simply that it's so closed that there is little to discuss about!

The 'cross platform' probably refer to the fact that this is not a 'Windows-only' board. I don't think it _requires_ that we only talk about stuff that runs of multiple platforms. Think Monkey Audio, or foobar2000.

Not a chance. MS is pushing their own WMA Lossless, so I'm fairly sure they'll never support FLAC themselves, except in the unlikely circumstance it becomes massively popular.

is WMA lossless really "mathmatically lossless" like it says, or is it like 64kbs is "CD quality"? thanks

What do you not understand on the term "lossless"?

hehe no it's really lossless like zip

Monkey's Audio works nice (at least) under Windows, Linux and BSD.
Foobar2000 is not Hydrogenaudio, it is only hosted here.

Well, there's official support for it on Windows and Macintosh.

And you can play/decode it almost anywhere with FFMPEG
http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/ffmpeg-doc.html#SEC17

When M$ says something you can never be sure.

By the time there is a WMA forum, pallidum/DRM will have already done their job, and the WMA forum, will just be full of curses

Yes, because you ported it - it was Windows only originally.

MS/Free software is good/evil/neutral stuff moved to offtopic forum.