Skip to main content

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: Why do people use WMA? How does it compare to other codecs? etc. (Read 38554 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Why do people use WMA? How does it compare to other codecs? etc.

Reply #50
I had a curiosity about WMA lossless in the past, but I had trouble finding info about it and I couldn't find a WMA encoder back then.  I didn't want to use Windows Media Player and I had already disabled it on my system because of filetype conflicts with other audio softwares. 

The other reason why I shied away from WMA was because of the spectre of DRM (Digital Rights Management), and I didn't want to ever encounter any of that since I remembered problems I had in the 90s with SCMS DRM on my minidisc recorder.  I know that's a totally different thing, but it turned me off entirely from all types of DRM. 

Ultimately, I went with FLAC because it was easy to find, easy to install, and easy to use.  My Sansa/SanDisk portable media player can play FLAC's (and OGG's and WMA's and MP3's) so that wasn't a problem either. 

For a while I used OGG's too, but I don't run into them that much in the wild.  I would probably use OPUS or M4A if more of my softwares and hardwares supported it.  My portable media player is supposed to be able to play M4A's but it always crashes on them for some reason, so I have given up on that for now.  I do download/extract some OPUS's from YouTube WebM's (MKV's) and then I convert them to FLAC's from within Foobar2000.  I also convert some M4A's to FLAC so I can play them on my portable media player too.
Be a false negative of yourself!