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Topic: A question about WMA encoders (Read 4675 times) previous topic - next topic
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A question about WMA encoders

I always thought that there exists just one standard WMA encoder by Microsoft that is included in all available WMA converters, that produces always the same quality at given settings. Until I came across "4Musics Multiformat Converter". It has probably its own WMA encoder that produces different quality (usually worse) WMA files. While the "standard" encoder encoded files are always marked as "Windows Media Audio x", the files encoded by 4Musics are marked as "WM-AUDIO". Maybe I'm saying bullshit, maybe there are much more different WMA encoders, if this is the case, then I would love to know one that produces better quality than the standard encoder.


J.M.

A question about WMA encoders

Reply #2 –
Okay, time for some samples 

The first sample is a standard WMA 9.1 file, the second is encoded by 4Musics. Both are encoded from the same sample, both are CBR 64kbps. (here the 4Musics sample apparently sounds better but the hihats are more "washed together")

Clip_WMA9.wma
Clip_4MUSICS.wma

Also note the size difference between the files.


J.M.

A question about WMA encoders

Reply #4 –
I'm not really sure. Is there a place where I can get the older codecs (such as WMA 8 or WMA 7) to compare? Also there are some Internet radios that sounds better (such as di.fm the 32k WMA stream) than the standard wma codecs.

A question about WMA encoders

Reply #5 –
Quote from: jmartis on
Also there are some Internet radios that sounds better (such as di.fm the 32k WMA stream) than the standard wma codecs.


That's probably because they do preprocessing before feeding the stream to the encoder.