Why not to use WMA/mp3pro

Lasse Penttinen
22 May 2002 1:36

Peter, one of WinAmp developers, gives you a very good list why not to use mp3pro or WMA. Read and learn – the man knows what he is writing about. This is a short summary of his pointers. Read the complete article here
1.Patents / licenses.
-mp3pro support will be probably never bundled with winamp.
2. Closed source, no publicly available libraries.
-Still, there are NO available mp3pro decoders for OS's different than Windows.
3. DRM encryption in WMA.
-You can't give them to your friends; you might be unable to play them after reinstalling Windows on the same computer.
4. Converting to other formats.
-Someday, you might want to convert your music files to WAV format for burning on CD. WMA format doesn't allow that.
5. Quality.
-Currently, Ogg Vorbis outperforms both WMA and mp3pro at any bitrate. Modern MP3 encoders (LAME) totally outperform WMA at 128kbps and above.
6. Alternatives.
- OGG Vorbis
- LAME MP3 Encoder
- MusePack
Addeneum: Why Converting Between Lossy Formats Sucks.
By encoding a track into some lossy format, you *always* lose quality. Therefore, if you convert from one lossy format to another (eg. from WMA to OGG), the destination file will always sound worse than source one, no matter what settings you use. If you want to get rid of your WMAs/mp3pros, re-rip source CDs into another format if you can; if the sources aren't available, it's better to keep them in existing format rather than convert to another one.

More from us
We use cookies to improve our service.