Is there any advantages of MP3 over WMA?

I have just bought a new MP3 player for £30, its a 128MB one but also has an FM radio and a SD/MMC expansion card so I can make it a 1GB player very cheaply.

It sounds very impressive with my Senheiser PX40 headphones, at the moment I am ripping WMA files as you can do this media player.

I am burning them at 160kpbs.

Is their any sonic differences between 160kbps WMA and 160kbps MP3 encoded with Lame?

 

Aren't WMAs supposed to be better? I seem to remember thinking 80kbps WMAs match 128kbps MP3s for sound quality. Or was that just Microsoft brainwashing?

Dunc

 

I am listening to through my MP3 player now on my £65 Beyer DTX900 and although detail is missing the presentation is very similier to my Marantz CD, the presentation is spot on, not too bright, not too tinny.

With MP3 I have always noticed a slightly synthesised sound, so I think WMA must be better unless my £30 MP3 player sounds better than an Ipod costing 5 times more.

 

FWIW My understanding is that WMAs are designed to sound better at lower bit rates than MP3's, which is kind of the point of a compressed format anyway make it sound as good as possible using as little file space as possible.

As you move further up the food chain to say 320kbs for an MP3 against a 320kbs WMA I think the differences are reduced if not swinging in MP3's favour. Never tested it though; life's too short....

 

Thats what my understanding was, but I didn't want to say it in case I had remembered wrongly!

I think the most important thing is to encode them well, not so much the bitrate but rather how much care is spent on doing it. I have some 128kbps mp3's that sound almost as good as CD and then some that sound dire. I think most people don't want to spend the time waiting for a good encoding when ripping. I don?t know why.. using a good encoder like MP3 Pro on highest quality encoding and 95-150kbps VBR a 4 min tune, on my 3.5ghz P4 1.5gb ram, only takes about 20seconds to encode. On a less well endowed machine it can?t take much longer.

 

Ok thanks, its all academic now anyway as my MP3 player has decided to pack in after just 20 minutes of use.

Stupid thing won't boot and I have replaced the firmware etc.

 

If you screwed it during a firmware upload then it is indeed trashed.

 

Well I just did what it told me to do in the instructions if it didn't boot. Of course the firmware update could have failed but it didn't work before I did it.