In reply to:

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Interesting... I switched from Fraunhofer to Xing because I could still hear aliasing in Fraunhofer High Quality even at 128k.

The trick is that Xing can do variable bit rate. The high-frequency aliasing and artifacts go away when you do VBR. That's the advantage of AudioCatalyst: When you do the middle-quality VBR, you get better sound than Fraunhofer at 128k-fixed, for about the same file size.

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Couldn't agree with you more, Tony (although I would use Xing's encoder with another front-end such as Easy CD-DA Extractor, which allows more flexibility in file naming). Xing's encoder is super-fast (at least as fast as WMA encoding when I played with it a while back), VBR gives excellent quality to compression ratios, and the format is not proprietary. One of the best features about the Empeg is that it is based on an open platform. How sad to put another one of Microsoft's attempts to dominate a key market sector (in this case multimedia streaming servers) on such a cool piece of kit.

And the guff that Microsoft put out about the compression/quality ratios of WMA compared with MP3 was their usual marketing rubbish. I played with it quite a lot, and from what I could tell, WMA may have been a little better at the same bitrate, but it certainly didn't offer similar quality at half the bit rate as they claimed, even when listening to Microsoft's own sample files. At 64kbps, a lot of WMAs sound hollow. You would want to use at least 96kbps, and probably 128kbps to play safe. And in that case, your files would be barely any smaller than VBR MP3s at high-normal (75%) quality setting.

To anyone thinking of using WMA, I would suggest that you have a look at WMA's digital rights management capabilities, built in to their proprietary metadata structure, to get an idea of what Microsoft intend to achieve with WMA. And then think about the the flexibility of MP3, that allows options such as ID3v2 tags, that you would be sacrificing if you abandoned it for the closed solution that is WMA (admittedly, theoretically you could use ID3v2 tags with WMA, but it is unlikely that Microsoft will support this).


Cheers,

Bruno
bruno@prior.ftech.co.uk