Efficient lossy formats: wma vs ogg

wma is not worth bothering with

you're better off using LAME to encode to mp3 if you decide to go with a player that doesn't support vorbis

in fact switching players is one argument for ripping to lossless on the computer... allows for easy transcoding of music to whatever format you want on your portable player without having to rerip everything should you decide to get a player that doesn't support your preferred format (or if you decide to use a different bitrate for the music on the player)

wma is supposed to be more efficient than mp3 at lower bitrates i.e a 64kbps wma file will sound about the same as a 128kbps mp3 one.

At comparable bitrate, a wma file is also of smaller size than an mp3 file.

What I'd do if I were you is pick a song you know very well and encode it in different formats, different bitrates, compare them while paying attention to the highs and lows and dynamics and decide if you hear a difference.

Quote:

Originally Posted by magicalpig 

wma is supposed to be more efficient than mp3 at lower bitrates i.e a 64kbps wma file will sound about the same as a 128kbps mp3 one.

 

At comparable bitrate, a wma file is also of smaller size than an mp3 file.

the whole "64kbps wma is equal to 128kbps mp3" thing was comparing wma to mp3 encoded using the ancient fraunhoffer encoder and even then it was BS... and when you bring LAME into the discussion it changes everything

also same bitrate = same size regardless of codec used

I seem to remember that AAC, or mp4 is the most efficient* codec at low bit rates, you can download a command line encoder by Nero for free, and use foobar to avoid the command lines.

There is an even more efficient version for extra low bit rates, the HE-AAC, but I don't know if the Nero codec supports it.

*by efficient, I mean highest quality for equivalent bit rate, it was the result of blind test by the guys at hydrogenaudio or doom9.

nero's encoder still does HE-AAC but it won't do much good in this discussion of portable players since support for it on portable devices is a bit iffy (partly because it's a CPU hog to decode it properly) most devices just decode it as AAC-LC (at a significant quality drop) players with rockbox decode it as HE-AAC but performance on some players (like my e280v1) is pretty weak (the whole thing freezes every few seconds and the battery indicator takes a nose dive AAC-LC works just fine though)

also according to wikipedia apple's encoder added HE-AAC encoding since i last checked (a few years back)

now the OP never mentioned which portable player it was that brought about this question of lossy formats and low bitrates only that it doesn't support vorbis

it would be nice to know what model it is so we could explore all options... it's possible it does support AAC or it's possible it has a firmware update to support vorbis... hell it could even be a model that can run rockbox

Ogg Vorbis all the way - as long as your player support it. Or else AAC or MP3.