WMA 9.2 Lossless or WAV?

[Guest]

The only issue I can think of, if I remember right, is WAV and its support of ID3 metadata and embedded album art but like I said, I can't remember.

 

Does not support metadata, or at least, not through Windows Explorer. Though Windows Explorer does not even support ID3v2.4 so that doesn't say much about it.

[Andre S. Veteran]

I have a couple believe it or not but I have no idea why I was thinking of just leaving the setting on for everything haha. Needless to say when I turned it down it made a BIG difference taking the folder size down to 520 MB. I'm surprised though that WAV isn't much bigger, I might go with that.

They were such great albums!!!

Just use WAV then, it's more compatible and you get the advantages of uncompressed audio (null seek times, data corruption resistance).

[Travesty]

Does not support metadata, or at least, not through Windows Explorer. Though Windows Explorer does not even support ID3v2.4 so that doesn't say much about it.

I was worried about the metadata issue but I think it'll be okay.

[Guest]

I was worried about the metadata issue but I think it'll be okay.

 

Might want to try MP3tag, perhaps. It is great for tagging FLACs, MP3s, and WMAs, though I haven't tried it with WAVs so I am not sure if it can embed metadata (but then, whatever you're accessing the files with also needs to support the same format of metadata). Link: http://www.mp3tag.de/en/index.html

[ditoax]

As storage space is so cheap and you want maximum compatibility I would say go with the nice and simple WAV format. It means you will need more space than if you were to use something like FLAC but it is probably the best solution for you.

 

I am not an audiophile but I do have decent-ish equipment so I like to have good quality music too. For on the go I just have everything in VBR MP3 as I am never going to be able to tell the difference when on a train or walking down the street but for my home audio system everything is in FLAC.

 

I would highly advise you to avoid things such as WMA. You never know when you might switch to a non-Windows platform and be ###### out of luck! Also I have been down the WMA route and got burned with incompatibilities using newer media players not supporting some of the old bits of WMA Pro encoded files. Was very painful so I switched to FLAC for my archiving as it is open source and spec and has amazing support everywhere.

[bandit_liberty_rumble]

Apple also released an opensource, lossless codec called ALAC 

Windows Phone actually used to support it natively. But for whatever reason, WP8 doesn't anymore.

 

Desktop Windows (including 8/RT) certainly supports the container format (with its metadata etc.) just fine, not sure why it doesn't yet natively support the codec itself, but Microsoft should get on it!

 

EDIT: Apparently Google Play supports ALAC, too

[Travesty]

Might want to try MP3tag, perhaps. It is great for tagging FLACs, MP3s, and WMAs, though I haven't tried it with WAVs so I am not sure if it can embed metadata (but then, whatever you're accessing the files with also needs to support the same format of metadata). Link: http://www.mp3tag.de/en/index.html

I'm a big fan already :yes:

[srbeen]

Why would you need to convert someone else's archive of music ?

 

 

Because although windows plays WMA fine, nothing else does. If I wanted to listen to WMA's I need to convert them to an open standard which is supported by my various media players, laptops, phones and car decks.

 

If OP never intends to share his archive of WMAs & plans to stick with windows for ever, it really don't matter what I think.

[HawkMan]

Because although windows plays WMA fine, nothing else does. If I wanted to listen to WMA's I need to convert them to an open standard which is supported by my various media players, laptops, phones and car decks.

 

If OP never intends to share his archive of WMAs & plans to stick with windows for ever, it really don't matter what I think.

 

Why would he share HIS library ? can't his friends buy their own music ? 

 

either way, read the OP's post, this is for him, not for sharing with his friends(wich is kind of illegal anyway), and he has devices that can read WAV and WMA and not FLAC, so suggesting FLAC is kind of useless. 

 

and the beauty of lossless, if you change devices you can easily convert the library without losing quality unlike lossy formats. 

[bandit_liberty_rumble]

the beauty of lossless, if you change devices you can easily convert the library without losing quality unlike lossy formats. 

 

This bears repeating.  At this point, I'd therefore be more concerned with proper metadata support, which instantly rules out WAV, in my opinion, because it is terrible in that regard.

 

So with only one other option left, use WMA Lossless, and then possibly think about converting it to a more broadly supported (and ideally open source, i.e. FLAC or ALAC) lossless format in the future.