WMA files??

Probably should be in FAQ (didn't find) thought I read somewhere that WMA was supported in the recent Rio car players? was I smoking?

Thanks, sorry if it's a FAQ

It will/should be by the time 2.0 is final.

Probably should be in FAQ (didn't find)

Did you try typing "WMA" into the search box? 'Cause when I tried it, it resulted in a hit on the following entry.

uhhmm, as of version 2? aren't we on v2.07 now.. still no support is there?

2.07 BETA . Betas usually precede a final. The reasons have been hinted at in multiple recent threads, i can't remember which though.

No, 2.0 BETA7 . It's the seventh beta version of v2.0

2.07beta implies that it's a beta of version 2.07, which would be _after_ 2.0. It's not, it's before.

aren't we on v2.07 now

No, we haven't even reached 2.00 yet. We're still on the betas preceding 2.00.

It's in the Beta that the alpha team have right now.

Rob

ahh gotcha, i think i forget about the regular release stuff since i have probably never installed it

So now we have WMA in Version 2.0 b11!!! Very cool! BUT wait...I spent last night exploring various rip/encode schemes and through my Paradigm A20's heard some differences but nothing truly dramatic. Where does WMA fit in the scheme? some say the qulaity is better and size is smaller....It is certainly easier to just fire up a CD on Windows and download the music to WMA format vs the task of setting up audiograbber-LAME system, but as with all Gatesian sofware i suspect there is more to the story. what say all the ABM people out there???

If you want to make tiny files, use WMA. If you want to make files that just sound as good as they're going to get, use MP3. Simple.

Bruno

i sorta don't agree with that statement.. i think if you are used to say rupping at 192 with lame, you will get teh same file size aned a MUCH better sound with wma..

now i fyou go 320 with lame.. or use the r3mix setting it will be a lot closer in sound.. but not justifiable for 2 times the space imho.

FWIW i notice less noise with wma.. over eac/lame/r3mix encoding.

LAME doesn't rip. It encodes. Ripping != encoding. The ripping process is always the same, no matter what encoder you choose.

If you want to compare two encoders, then you do all your testing with the exact same WAV file. You also contradict yourself in your statements. Using r3mix settings in LAME will, on average, produce smaller sizes than 192CBR.

Anyway, use what you like. That's why WMA support is in there to begin with. But if you're really concerned about how something sounds to you, then you should obviously test your own tracks. LAME has a lot of options that will go far beyond the quality of not supplying any options at all.

Bruno

i never said i ripped with lame, take a look back and notice teh EAC part of the equation.

None of the file i rip wth the r3mix settin are smaller then 192 cbr, if one of my mp3's is 5.5 megs with 192, you can bet it is 8-9 with r3mix settings.

and furthermore the ripping process is not the same.. especially if you have damaged discs.. eac take 3 hrs to read a scratched disc that windows media can do in an hour.

Very subjective. The generalisation is only correct when comparing to Xing type MP3. However when comparing to LAME you'll find on low bit rate WMA (e.g. 64kbps which is supposed to be the equivalent in quality to a 128kbps MP3) is noticeably worse, even without headphones, because so much of the treble detail is lost. IMO MP3pro makes a better job of lower encoded files, but then of course MP3Pro is not a widely supported format. I don't know at what bit rate WMA does starts to begin to come into it's own, but I shall be experimenting with WMA in the next couple of days just out of curiosity

You did it again. You called LAME a ripper. "file i rip wth the r3mix settin "

Ripping is ripping. Encoding is encoding. It's obvious your tests are using two different rippers and two different encoders. That's more than one variable, which means your test for end quality is invalid when trying to qualify the encoder.

Like I said, do both WMA and MP3 encodes from the SAME wav file. And you want to know why EAC takes so long? Because it's doing a far superior job to Windows Media Player.

Anyway, if any of your rips are taking an hour, you either have a disc that should be replaced or a very poor CDROM drive.

You can easily use emplode to see what the average bitrate is on VBR files. Mine fall into the ranges mentioned on the r3mix site. They are NOT, on average, as large as 192kbit tracks.

Bruno

whatever

I'm sorry you have such a problem staying civil. I can't read your mind and can only go by what you're writing.

I have over 5900 tracks on my player right now. All slight variants of r3mix. So when I mention "average" I'm actually talking about an average. If you're going to pick one specific track, then just don't represent it as an average. I have verified the information made public on the r3mix site.

Now, if you go back to what I orginally wrote.. Encode with whatever you want. But don't get bent out of shape when you put your foot in your mouth and when you simply provide information that doesn't jive with that elsewhere. Most of all, think twice before telling someone to do what you just mentioned.

Bruno

I don't have any experience with WMA, so I can't comment on that. But I do have about 200 albums encoded with the r3mix preset, so just as a point of information, the average bitrate of my music collection (only valid for the types of music, I've chosen to buy) is about 197 kbps, negligibly more than 192. With regard to "mr. smartypants's" other points, they seem perfectly valid to me, I don't see anything that warrants this explosion of terms like "STFU" Lets try to keep the posts more objective if we can here. Feel free to ignore me if you want, of course.

John

point taken..

i get set off by people that belittle others or attempt to over the internet.. there are a lot of things to learn from a lot of people.. when i read multple posts on the same day by the same person attempting to belittle someone(s) it bothers me.. especially when they have racked up an astounding 1000 posts in 3 months..

bottom line is, if you don't have something nice to say and your whole point is to try to make someone feel stupid.. don't post.

fwiw this test was done with MULTIPLE wav's i was exhibiting ONE example.

Great. I have tracks that also average to 240kbit or so and some others that come to about 160 (or a bit lower).

BTW, if I was trying to belittle you, I wouldn't have bothered to be helpful at the same time. Maybe hop on over to the OffTopic forum for a little taste of Mr.Happy.

Bruno

oops you are right. I dont know where I got 2.07 from.

If you can't hear anything above 13 or 14khz, then WMA is the encoder for you. However, some of us haven't lost enough hearing to not notice the difference yet.

Sean

a little taste of Mr.Happy.

No thanks. I'll trust your judgement on what Mr. Happy tastes like.

it would be really interesting to see the graphs proving that.

I'll find you some. :-) But it doesn't really matter what the graphs show, its really up to each person to listen to each and come to their own conclusion. Everyones hearing is different, and the models these encoders use assume that everyones hearing is the same.

Sean

no i really asn't trying to be a smartass, i would like some if you can find them.

Ok, I found some. They are here: http://ff123.net/peacefulspecview.html
The whole site is pretty good for codec info. I tried the hearing test that was linked there. Interesting stuff.

http://ff123.net/

You can see in the wma graph where the dropouts start at 13khz, there are some spikes up to 15khz, but they would probably just sound like ringing to me. The lame graph is cut off at 16khz due to a lowpass, but there are fewer dropouts.

Sean

I have a 71.4MB .wma file that shows up as "Invalid file format" when I try to play it. It is 5hr 6min long. Properties say 32kbps, 44kHz, stereo.

Appartently the Rio Car can not play protected wma files. How do I tell if it is protected? It plays on Windoze Media Player 6.04 (the latest available for NT4) and I loaded it via Jemplode 2b11 and my player is at 2.00-beta11.

That is correct, The car player will not play copy-protected WMA files.

I'm not sure how to tell if the file is protected or not, but have you tried "file/properties" in Media Player?

Another thing to try. If you can, try sending it to the player with Emplode instead of Jemplode.

If Emplode sends the file and it works, or if emplode refuses to send the file in the first place because it's protected, perhaps it's just a bug in Jemplode.

Personally, I would like to see both products (emplode and jemplode) give you a warning on bad files, but still somehow give you the option of sending the file anyway. For instance, in case I didn't have Hijack on the player and wanted to send a zipfile to the player for taxi purposes.

jEmplode does not currently parse WMA files ... I don't know the impact of not having all the tags set properly on import (i.e. will the Empeg still play a WMA whose tags are not initialized properly). Currently jEmplode doesn't care if you drop random files on your Empeg (i.e. non MP3 files). I think it will just leave them alone.

I ran emplode at home and it popped up saying that some songs had been uploaded with an older version of the software would I like to fix it -yes.


Uploaded 6 new albums.


Quit.


Ran emplode again. Downloaded the offending track (monday.wma). Got the file (now monday.wma.wma on the PC). Clicked on it and MediaJukebox started playing it. Found Windows Media Player and that worked fine too.


Renamed it to test.wma.

Ran emplode. Uploaded file. Went to play it and now it had the tag from the Media Player "The Steve Dahl Show" instead of just the filename in the playlist. It plays fine.


Went to report results here and decided to check the original version (monday.wma) and that plays fine now too.
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I would just use empeg, but it won't install w/o admin access on the NT 4 SP6 machines we use at work - but jemplode works fine.

s/w: empeg 2b11, jemplode 2b11, RioCar 2b11 consumer

I'm a little confused -- Are you talking about a jEmplode test or an emplode test? should I replace the word "emplode" with "jemplode" in your post?

Mike

I originally uploaded the WMA file at work with JEmplode (I can't install EMPLODE there) and the file showed up as invalid format when I tried to play it. I ran Emplode at home (on W95) and it apparently fixed the file format problem (and loaded the WMA meta data when I made the RioCar/PC/RioCar roundtrip). The last comment, under the ---, was that JEmplode runs well at work, but I can't install/run Emplode - Lite whining that Emplode requires admin privleges to install, JEmplode doesn't handle WMA files well yet, and most importantly - they went to a much more secure admin password scheme for our NT boxes at work.

Yeah -- I don't have any of the code to parse bitrate, etc. out of a WMA file ... It's in emptool, I just haven't ported it yet. Honestyl there hasn't been a whole lot of people who have asked about WMA, but I'll queue it up to do. Mike

I just put in WMA support tonight -- grab the latest prerelease jar at http://www.jempeg.org and try it out ... See if it fixes the problems you were seeing before.

Mike

Bingo. JEmplode uploads the file and with the WMA meta data.

You guys sure know how to get things fixed quickly around here.



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BTW the files sound somewhat better on the PC. There is a bunch of digital artifacts from the low bitrate ("Fixed rate Stereo 32kbits/s" per empeg info screen) and on the PC they seem to be filtered somewhat and come out sort of high & squeaky on the empeg.

I can tweak the EQ settings until good playback of AM quality WMA files is made a priority.

Cool ... I'm afraid the sound quality issue is not my department ... We'll have to leave that one to the Empeg guys. ms

BTW the files sound somewhat better on the PC. There is a bunch of digital artifacts from the low bitrate ("Fixed rate Stereo 32kbits/s" per empeg info screen) and on the PC they seem to be filtered somewhat and come out sort of high & squeaky on the empeg.

Based on your description, I'm betting the WMA files where you're complaining about the audio quality are not CD rips, they are something else, perhaps sound bites downloaded from the web. Right?

If your WMA files are not 44.1khz 16-bit stereo (in other words, they are some kind of lower-sample-rate web sound byte instead of actual CD rips), then I would expect that your sound quality problems are due to the sample rate conversion algorithm not being optimized for that rate.

There is a whole complicated science to sample rate conversion. It's a lot like image scaling/resizing in a graphics application: Some do it better than others.

Imagine that your 11khz audio file were a bitmap image. Say, for example, it was a small 320x200 graphic.

If you resize a tiny 320x200 graphic to fill a high resolution monitor, say, 1152x864, you will get blocky jagged edges on the image, right? Unless you did some kind of bilinear resampling of the image, then it wouldn't have jaggies but it would be blurry.

Well, sampling an 11khz 8-bit mono audio file up to 44.1khz 16-bit stereo is very much the same thing. High frequency artifacts in an audio file are like the jaggies in that image. And a lowpass filter on an audio file is like the blurring feature in an image editor.

So. Your windows WMA-player applet is probably doing a better job of samplerate conversion than the empeg car player because it's designed to play crappy little soundbytes and it's already tweaked to hide the "jaggies" in the upconversion to your soundcard. The empeg-car player, on the other hand, was meant to play nothing but CD rips from the get-go, and they probably didn't bother with a fancy samplerate converter algorithm, figuring that no one would want to play web soundbites on their high-quality car player.

Oh I understand, just thought I would pass it on.

It actually works pretty well, and with EQ adjustment it sounds OK.

I did find that the right button (FFWD) seems to be sluggish at times. Slow to start FFWDing, sometimes continuing on after letting go. Also after about 100 min the sounds samples disapear when FFWDing (it is silent instead of the choppy sounds sample you usually get).

There are some known problems with low-bitrate WMA files, too. I think FF/RW is one of them. I think that's even in the release notes.