CD-WMA Lossless Conversion - File Bloat in R12.2?

[audiofool]

I have recently upgraded my dBPowerAMp from R11.5 to r12.2 "Referece". When I rip a CD to WMA VBR 100 Lossless at 96 KHz the files are around twice the size of the same audio tracks ripped under R11.5 and are larger than the original on the CD. It also takes much longer to rip and convert the files.

Why is this and is htere anything I can do about it other than reverting back to R11.5?

I use the WMA 9 Pro codec (I have Windows 2000). Previously I used the db-wmfdist-wma9 codec which no longer works with R12.2.

Thanks!

[LtData]

Re: CD-WMA Lossless Conversion - File Bloat in R12.2?

Why did you pick 96KHz for the frequency? The CD is only 44.1KHz, which is why the original CD is smaller then the lossless files.

[Wayne]

Re: CD-WMA Lossless Conversion - File Bloat in R12.2?

I think that he is referring to the bitrate of 96kbps.

What other options did you specify CBR, ABR or VBR? Did you specify the 2-pass option?

Wayne

[Spoon]

Re: CD-WMA Lossless Conversion - File Bloat in R12.2?

For lossless you only have the choice of channels and frequency, which for a cd should be 4.1KHz and 2 channels.

[audiofool]

Re: CD-WMA Lossless Conversion - File Bloat in R12.2?

It may not be sensible but I have ripped over 500 CDs that way using R11.2 without problems, quickly and with a good compression ratio. I use WMA as an archive format and high quality playback but convert to MP3 (using the batch converter) for portable devices.

Just to reiterate is am using VBR Quality 100 at 96KHz, with 2 channel 24bit, single pass. With 12.2 I have used AccurateRip, but it reports no problems with the example below.

When I pull up the file audio properties for two files ripped with R11.5 and R12.2 everything is identical except the files size. For example the Queen track Bohemian Rapsody with R11.5 is 42.03MB in size, with R12.2 it is 101.07MB. The original size is given as 129.5MB. i.e. a 3:1 compression vs. 1.2 in R12.2. The time to rip is correspondingly longer.

I hope this helps...

[LtData]

Re: CD-WMA Lossless Conversion - File Bloat in R12.2?

I am still puzzled why you are taking an audio CD, which is 16-bit and 44.1KHa, and making a 24-bit, 96KHz WMA Lossless file. You are just wasting space when you do this and, in fact, are not getting an exact copy of the CD, as resampling is a lossy process.

As for why r11.5 and r12 are giving you two different file sizes, are you sure you were using the same settings in r11.5?

[Spoon]

Re: CD-WMA Lossless Conversion - File Bloat in R12.2?

In R11.5 if you set 24 it 96 Khz then the file would be the same size as R12.

[audiofool]

Re: CD-WMA Lossless Conversion - File Bloat in R12.2?

If there is a way to post/e-mail jpg files I can show you the screen shots from the audio properties, where you can see all the settings are the same for both.

As an experiment I ripped the same file (Bo rap) using R12.2 first to WAV at 96KHz, 16bit, which gave a file size of 129.5MB (the same size as the "original" reported in the audio properties of the direct WMA rips. I then converted this to a WMA file using the VBR 100, 96KHz, 2-Channel, 24-bit Setting. The file size came to 43,037KB exactly the same as the file when ripped directly to WMA in R11.5.

For interest, I tried the same using dBPowerAmp on a Windows XP machine with WMA 10 and got similar results to R12.2 its not limited to WMA 9.1.

[LtData]

Re: CD-WMA Lossless Conversion - File Bloat in R12.2?

You cannot upload JPG or other screenshots, but you can link to them if you can upload them somewhere else. If you could to this, we could try to figure out why you are getting two different file sizes.

Another test is to take the larger file from r12.2 and re-encode it using the same settings in r11.5 and tell us what the filesize is.

[Spoon]

Re: CD-WMA Lossless Conversion - File Bloat in R12.2?

You do know that encoding to 24 bit, 96 KHz is giving less quality than encoding to 44.1KHz 16 bit (in this instance)?