.WMA or MP3

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guitarfreak12

guitarfreak12

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what's more reliable and stable. I have to transfer some huge files to some one, on a regular basis, and sometimes I find that without warning the .wma files sound compressed and garbled when at once they sounded ok, weird, so if I choose mp3, is that more stable?
 
mp3 and wma are both lossy formats....they compress the hell out of your files, ruining sound quality.

that being said, i'd go with mp3 if i were you. WMA files are proprietary to windows media player, and not everyone can play them. MP3 is a much more popular format.
 
bennychico11 said:
MP3 is a much more popular format.
Click to expand...

ok, I just didn't know if they were popular because of stability or ease of use.
 
WMA came out to compete against MP3, but with iTunes, Napster, etc., they really had no chance. I'm sure you could get into a head to head match of which is better, MP3 or WMA and prove to me that one is better than the other, but really they both do the same thing....compress your files to make them smaller and ruin your sound.

It's either six of one,
or half dozen to another.
 
Personally, I HATE wma files with a burning passion. They're a wintel-exclusive technology, so anyone who isn't running Microsoft-savvy machines can't play them very well. If your audience happens to be running a Mac, they'll (most likely) have to run Windows Media player to play it with all of its features and Mac users generally despise Windows Media Player because it sucks.

Mp3 is an MPEG compression. The people at MPEG are amazing. Their sole mission in life is to provide awesome audio/video compression. They're smart and their motivation comes from the right place. Their technology is well-researched, well planned out, solution-oriented (not competition-oriented), and MP3 is more universally supported and generally more versatile.

I vote MP3.
 
I'm a Mac user, so I can vouch for what was said. It's true, WMA files often do play on a Mac, but only non-protected ones, and Microsoft seems to like to do weird codecs that won't work on the Mac version sometimes.

For my personal audio listening, I use the AAC format (MPEG4 audio) which Apple uses for iTunes Music Store, but if I need to share something with the general public, I use MP3 because it's compatible with almost everything.
 
firetech said:
Mp3 is an MPEG compression. The people at MPEG are amazing. Their sole mission in life is to provide awesome audio/video compression. They're smart and their motivation comes from the right place.
Click to expand...
Amazing? Awesome? Then why do Ogg, Musepack, and WMA all provide higher quality at smaller file sizes?
 
Newer formats and compression algorithms? MP3 is a very old format by today's new standards.
AAC/MPEG4 is the current shindig. ;)
 
in actuality, WMA provides for better sound quality at lower bitrates. I did a lot of research on it when deciding what to make my online streaming radio station use as a format. Especially at low bitrates (less than 160k), WMA blows MP3 out of the water.
 
JazzMang said:
in actuality, WMA provides for better sound quality at lower bitrates. I did a lot of research on it when deciding what to make my online streaming radio station use as a format. Especially at low bitrates (less than 160k), WMA blows MP3 out of the water.
Click to expand...
Not that I've tried it, but isn't there a lossless WMA format? At least that's what my version of WMP indicates. Has anyone tried it to see if it is truly lossless?
 
Alexbt said:
Newer formats and compression algorithms? MP3 is a very old format by today's new standards.
AAC/MPEG4 is the current shindig. ;)
Click to expand...



AAC is the digs, why the hell do we still use mp3/wma?

really, i don't get it.
 
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