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Topic: mp3 vs wma (Read 8645 times) previous topic - next topic
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mp3 vs wma

Hi.
I have a car radio Pioneer DEH-1500UB. It supports WMA Standard (WMA/V2?) and MP3. I have my music collection in FLAC format. Which format is better: WMA/V2 294-378 Kbps (quality 100%) vs. lame MP3 320 Kbps (CBR)? I was looking for information on this forum, but I find only information about how to convert between encoders (for converting from flac I was use foobar2000).

mp3 vs wma

Reply #1 –
Quote from: qwerty01 on
Hi.
I have a car radio Pioneer DEH-1500UB. It supports WMA Standard (WMA/V2?) and MP3. I have my music collection in FLAC format. Which format is better: WMA/V2 294-378 Kbps (quality 100%) vs. lame MP3 320 Kbps (CBR)? I was looking for information on this forum, but I find only information about how to convert between encoders (for converting from flac I was use foobar2000).


If storage is not a problem Mp3 @ 320K is your best solution. Put a 32GB stick on that USB port and way you go.

mp3 vs wma

Reply #2 –
At those bitrates, I'd imagine you'd be hard pressed to tell them apart from each other or the lossless source, even on headphones. Very unlikely in a car. If you ever want to play them elsewhere (e.g plug the USB stick into a digital TV or receiver or a Mac), MP3 is almost universally supported, but WMA is certainly not, so for that reason, but not quality reasons, I'd say use LAME MP3 (which also supports gapless playback if implemented on the player - rare in hardware players).
Dynamic – the artist formerly known as DickD

mp3 vs wma

Reply #3 –
I would go for VBR encoding in LAME, as it's a much better trade-off between quality and space than CBR. Quite optimal in fact. As Dynamic said, a car is a noisy thing, so no need to go to extremes (-V0). Maybe you can go down to -V3, -V4 or even lower, it's your ears so I can't really help you there. Experiment a little

mp3 vs wma

Reply #4 –
I want play only in car audio (pendrive 8 GB). File size is not a problem.
 

mp3 vs wma

Reply #5 –
If it's only ever in car and you never want to squeeze more audio onto 8GB, just use either of your first two options. They'll almost certainly both be transparent for virtually any audio. And don't worry if you accidentally use, LAME -V3 or -V4, even -V5 one time, that'll almost certainly sound exactly the same too. It will just have less of an enormous safety margin.

I'd imagine WMA at 160 kbps and up will also be transparent in the car environment too, but few of us round here use WMA regularly because it's not so widely supported or significantly better than LAME and because it's easy to mess up and use WMA Pro which is hardly supported anywhere outside Windows PCs.
Dynamic – the artist formerly known as DickD