WMA VBR Q10 gets the thumbs up

[Spoons]

to see what WMA is up to i converted from .wav Mozart's Symphony No- 40 In G Minor - Andante to WMA VBR Q10. well i nearly fell over backward! whilst there is slight differences i can say they are negligible small differences! i was very impressed that it whacked a 98 meg classical wav file down to a measly 2 1/2 meg at 9:31 length in just 58 seconds.

so how did my beloved OGG at 192/kbps stack up against WMAQ10?
i would be toooooooooo embarrassed to post the results! :p

[Paddy]

Re: WMA VBR Q10 gets the thumbs up

Wow that sounds good :D

Sorry to hijack the thread, but that reminds me If I wanted a music track to be compressed to as small a size as possible with best sound, which codec should I be using? From what you said WMA, but which setting will be best?(it's to fit as much music as possible on a cheap 64meg mp3/wma player I'm getting for down the gym)

[Spoons]

Re: WMA VBR Q10 gets the thumbs up

i don't know the answer to that one. but i had a look at the WMA tag to see what the bitrate was and it said : "optimalbitrate 33955" and also "bitrate 41941" . the compression ratio was 40:1. so i dont know what i should be reading for the bitrate? i guess it means the VBR was between 33/kbps and 41/kbps?

[Spoons]

Re: WMA VBR Q10 gets the thumbs up

oh what is your source files you are converting from? or are we talking direct rip from cd first?

i just tried to do something similar in mp3 at VBR 34-48 setting and it made violins sound like chirping birds that were in need of attention. not good at all.

[Paddy]

Re: WMA VBR Q10 gets the thumbs up

Just thinking about converting some mp3's for use on the portable player, to try and get as much music on it's little 64meg memory as possible without losing to much sound quality. Most of my mp3's are at 192+, so was considering converting the ones to listen to down to 128, but was wandering if wma may be a better choice! Will have a play this afternoon :D

[Spoons]

Re: WMA VBR Q10 gets the thumbs up

ah ok well my results were from wav so i dont know how it will turn out transcoding mp3 to WMA. should be interesting.

[ChristinaS]

Re: WMA VBR Q10 gets the thumbs up

Just thinking about converting some mp3's for use on the portable player, to try and get as much music on it's little 64meg memory as possible without losing to much sound quality. Most of my mp3's are at 192+, so was considering converting the ones to listen to down to 128, but was wandering if wma may be a better choice! Will have a play this afternoon :D

I'd take a guess that you'll find wma at 96 (CBR) or thereabouts to be quite equivalent in discernable audio quality to your mp3's at 192, at half the file size. Of course, the VBR Q10 may be far superior, I'd really like to try it out soon myself.

Does anybody know offhand how VBR Q10 wma is played (if at all) on the web, either streamed or not? What happens if the user doesn't have the latest Windows Media Player? I suppose I should try it myself but I'm feeling a bit lazy of late

[Paddy]

Re: WMA VBR Q10 gets the thumbs up

Thanks a lot ChristinaS, I had a play around with all the compression rates last night. Found with WMA at 64 the quality was on par with mp3 at 128, the wma file had some distortion on the guitar sound (medium/high frequency) and the mp3 had distortion on the high frequencies, like the cymbals. Put the setting up to 96 for the WMA and it was on par with mp3 at 192, with little discernable difference between the WMA file and the original audio when listening to it on the mp3 player, through headphones. Used it with VBR 2-pass to get best quality and it compresses it down to about 30 meg for a normal lenght album as compared to 50-60 for the 192 mp3's.

So I'm happy, 2 albums can fit nicely on the 64meg memory, enough for walking to and form work, then just swap the albums in the evening ready for the next day :D Best 20 quid I've spent in a long time.

[ChristinaS]

Re: WMA VBR Q10 gets the thumbs up

Thanks a lot ChristinaS, I had a play around with all the compression rates last night. Found with WMA at 64 the quality was on par with mp3 at 128, the wma file had some distortion on the guitar sound (medium/high frequency) and the mp3 had distortion on the high frequencies, like the cymbals. Put the setting up to 96 for the WMA and it was on par with mp3 at 192, with little discernable difference between the WMA file and the original audio when listening to it on the mp3 player, through headphones. Used it with VBR 2-pass to get best quality and it compresses it down to about 30 meg for a normal lenght album as compared to 50-60 for the 192 mp3's.

So I'm happy, 2 albums can fit nicely on the 64meg memory, enough for walking to and form work, then just swap the albums in the evening ready for the next day :D Best 20 quid I've spent in a long time.

Glad your mp3 player also plays wma files. I'd better have my son check his, as he is always complaining about lack of space and/or poor quality for his music, then maybe he'll use wma .... and then again, maybe not as it may not be "cool" with his pals