WMA Lossless options

[TechVsLife]

I wanted to convert music into lossless, and selected WMA Lossless. However, I noticed additional options in settings which the other lossless formats don't have:
I selected 44 KHZ and 2 channel 16 bit VBR.

Does that mean I lost information compared to other choices (such as 2 channel 24 bit VBR)? What are the proper settings for lossless? Thanks.

(**I just noticed that audio CD's are 44 KHz and 16-bit, so I assume my original setting is fine--but do the settings really make a difference; does that imply other lossless formats, which don't have multiple setting options here, might be worse than wma lossless if the input is 5.1 channel or 24-bit?)

[Spoon]

Re: WMA Lossless options

It is quite odd there are those settings, setting to match the source is a good idea.

[LtData]

Re: WMA Lossless options

WMA Lossless does allow for 2 channel 16-bit or 24-bit or 5.1 24-bit. However, since you are dealing with CDs, keep it at 2-channel 16-bit, otherwise you just waste space.

[TechVsLife]

Re: WMA Lossless options

WMA Lossless does allow for 2 channel 16-bit or 24-bit or 5.1 24-bit. However, since you are dealing with CDs, keep it at 2-channel 16-bit, otherwise you just waste space.

Thanks. The puzzle now is that selecting FLAC, for example, doesn't show such an option, even though 5.1 is in FLAC, in the recent releases anyway. That implies either that dbpoweramp is doing something for FLAC that it's not doing for Windows Lossless (i.e. checking the input type and choosing parameters for you automatically) or that there's some other difference I don't understand in how to use them. (If dbpoweramp only works with CD audio, then shouldn't it autoselect 16-bit 44 KHz for wma lossless, as I assume it's doing for FLAC?)

[LtData]

Re: WMA Lossless options

From a quick test, it looks like FLAC maintains the same frequency and channels as the original file. I tested with a 5.1 WAV file and a 5.1 FLAC file was created.

[TechVsLife]

Re: WMA Lossless options

Okay, wma lossless does not behave that way. It makes a difference what option you select, i.e. you can override and encode to a higher bit than the source (which probably is useless). dbamppro will not correct the setting for you, but it will give you a warning if you have verify audio selected (i.e. audio verification fails on wma lossless if bitrate is not the bitrate of CD -- in my testing).
The files get superlarge:
44 KHz, 16-bit, 2 channel: about 2 MB
96-KHz, 24 bit, 5.1 channel: about 24 MB

So this is very minor, but perhaps it should be a feature request, to match encoding to source for wma lossless, or have an option, as the default, to match source encoding.

From a quick test, it looks like FLAC maintains the same frequency and channels as the original file. I tested with a 5.1 WAV file and a 5.1 FLAC file was created.