What settings to use on Windows Media player??

Status
Not open for further replies.
Joined
May 26, 2009
Messages
854
Location
Hill Country TX
Hello, Please excuse my lack of knowledge here. What I'm trying to do is copy a bunch of CD's to a new micro card I just got. It's 128 GB so I'm not worried about compressing the music.

What I want to do is copy the CD's to the card with the highest quality sound, with the 128 GB card I'm not too worried about the storage size.

I think what I want is lossless format, but there are a couple listed, and I'm not too knowledgeable on this stuff. Also is there a better ripper than the Windows Media Player that came with my computer?? Thanks, Tom
 
If you want highest quality, you should use lossless formats such as FLAC or ALAC. These are lossless but compressed, so they take up less space. Alternatively you can use plain WAV - this is uncompressed and takes up the most space.

But the question is: what are you going to insert that micro card into? Is it some portable audio player? And if so, what audio formats can it play? This should factor into your ripping format decision. Many portable players don't support lossless formats.

As for what tools to use - I use Foobar2000 in Windows.
 
Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete
If you want highest quality, you should use lossless formats such as FLAC or ALAC. These are lossless but compressed, so they take up less space. Alternatively you can use plain WAV - this is uncompressed and takes up the most space.


For what it's worth, Windows will not natively support FLAC. It's easy enough to use another media player and it's also easy enough to install a codec pack that will enable FLAC and a host of other formats.

Windows has their own lossless format, as does Apple; but then, as is usual for proprietary software, you're bound to them. FLAC is free/ libre open source software so you'll never be snookered if you happen to change playback systems in the future.
 
Originally Posted By: uc50ic4more
For what it's worth, Windows will not natively support FLAC.

Good point. It's been a while since I've even used WMP to do anything other than maybe play a movie. It looks like Windows Media Audio (lossless) and WAV are the only two lossless options there out of the box.

For some reason I kept thinking WinAmp when the OP wrote Windows Media Player.
 
Thanks for the replies and info!1 The card will mainly be used in my 2014 Ford Fusion with the Sony My Sync sound system. I believe it can read most major formats. It has a built in slot for a media card.
 
Judging from a quick google search, Ford's MySync supported formats are MP3, AAC, WMA and WAV, so forget about FLAC or ALAC.

It wasn't clear whether the WMA that it supports is only lossy or also lossless. Your safest bet if you want lossless is probably WAV. But realistically, you will not be able to tell a difference between lossless and something like 320kbps MP3 in a car. On a super high end home audio system - maybe, but even then, 99.9% of people couldn't tell them apart.
 
Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete
Judging from a quick google search, Ford's MySync supported formats are MP3, AAC, WMA and WAV, so forget about FLAC or ALAC.


All patent-encumbered formats. Big Corporations and freedom do not often intersect!

You will find the same situation in non-Android portable devices, too.

Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete
It wasn't clear whether the WMA that it supports is only lossy or also lossless.


I have never encountered soft- or hardware that differentiated.
 
Originally Posted By: uc50ic4more
I have never encountered soft- or hardware that differentiated.

I've come across car audio systems that differentiated based on bit rate. Anything higher than 320 kbps they would not play, and any lossless format will surely have higher bit rate than this.

Alas, if it can play WAV that has bit rate of 1411 kbps, then hopefully bit rate limitation is not an issue here.
 
Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete
Alas, if it can play WAV that has bit rate of 1411 kbps, then hopefully bit rate limitation is not an issue here.


The bandwidth itself is rarely the issue these days. The more heavily compressed data is, the more CPU It takes to decompress it. The h264 video codec is probably the poster child for this: It'll squish data down like nothing we've ever seen before while retaining excellent visual quality; but man, oh, man does it take a lot of horsepower to decode it.

I have actually had to begin encoding some of my videos at a higher bitrate in order to play them on an underpowered laptop. The extra bitrate (and commensurate bandwidth) are not even close to being a problem; but if I compress the videos too much the poor little CPU cannot decode it quickly enough!

... And now that you mention that you have seen devices that "cap out" at 320kbps I recall having some trouble making DVD's years ago - The DVD spec allowed for just over 9.2mbps but I had horrible luck with cheap players "capping out" at just under 8; so I learned to just use that.
 
After opening windows media player and seeing what the options were, I would just do 320kbps mp3. I've been impressed by AAC too, so that's another option through iTunes.
 
Yeah, I've seen some really silly approaches out there. Wife's 2008 C300 was a perfect example. Not only did it have that 320 kbps limitation, it also had a file size limitation on AAC files. It wouldn't play any AAC file larger than about 20 MB. Apparently, rather than reading it piece by piece, it was trying to load the entire file into its cache first, and it must not have had much of it, so it would fail. Or at least that's what I think was happening.

BTW, that system used some flavor of QNX as its operating system.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top