So.. I'm about to rip all of my CD's to my computer to transfer to my new Blackberry Storm 2. I've never really messed with lossy compression because I would rather lug around a CD. However, now the idea of keeping all of my tunes on one device is a cool concept.

That said, I've been reading about different lossy compression and I'm intrigued by WMA pro. Is there a general concensus about it? Why does it only go up to 192 kbps? How does it compare to say AAC Itunes Plus?

Thanks

Its some proprietary MS codec family aimed at roughly the same niche as AAC thats not widely supported.



IIRC the max bitrate can be MB/s, and the encoder I'm looking at will happily do 440Kbps stereo.



AAC+ is a low bitrate codec designed to give acceptable quality, mostly for streaming. WMA Pro is mostly used for high bitrate and multichannel, but also has some low bitrate stuff in the newest version IIRC. I've never seen them compared at AAC+'s bitrates.

"Itunes Plus" is not AAC+. It is just preset for AAC encoder: 256 kbps, 44.1kHz, VBR.

And max. bitrate for WMAPro CBR is 256kbps for 44.1/16bit/stereo and 440kbps for 44.1/24bit/stereo (at least Winamp, Audition and WMEncoder show these values).