WMA Lossless Playing at 4.5MBPS

sim2340sim2340 Bisley,Woking,Surrey
edited June 2006 in Internet & Media
I have noticed that WMA Lossless files Converted (Only) by Win Media Edtion
Audio Converter play at 4.5 MBPS(sounds Great!) On what I have tested Media monkey and jet audio but it does not play at that speed on Win Media Player.

Convert to the same file using Jet audio and it plays at a average of about
900 KBPS.:confused:

I find this bizzare can anyone Explain?

P.S sorry it's in the wrong forum it is my first thread i have done

Comments

  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited May 2006
    sim2340 wrote:
    ...P.S sorry it's in the wrong forum it is my first thread i have done
    No problem, it's fixed now. :wave:

    I'm sorry, but I don't have an answer to your question. You came to the right place, though - I'm sure someone will be along soon to help you out.

    Welcome to Short-Media. :)
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited May 2006
    You've happened upon one of the more common misconceptions concerning lossless audio: bitrate is meaningless as a measure of quality. Lossless compression operates similarly to ZIP or RAR compression except it is optimized for audio rather than ASCII text. Typically lossless audio compression be it FLAC, APE, or lossless WMA will be about 25% to 50% of the original PCM WAV file size.

    I'm just guessing but I'll wager that Audio Converter is giving you the bitrate of the decompressed audio while jetAudio, MM, and WMP are giving you the bitrate of the compressed file.

    It is worth noting though that since the audio will be exactly the same regardless of bitrate, lower bitrates are more desirable because they indicate better compression. This is the exact opposite of lossy audio encoders where lower bitrate indicates more data removed.

    -drasnor :fold:
  • EnverexEnverex Worcester, UK Icrontian
    edited June 2006
    Gonna have to correct you there Drasnor. As I have pretty much all of my audio in lossless I'm kinda used to the file sizes. It's normally more often 55-75% of the original wave file size unless the track contains lots of blank areas or very quiet bits of almost nothing in which case it compresses much better. i.e. Evanesance tracks compress to around 70% of their original size where as things like my hypnotherapy cassettes (which I "digitally remastered" because they were awful) compress to 25% of the original size, even sometimes down to 15% (due to the only thing being there is his voice, lots of blank time although I'm sure Paul Mackenna's would be bigger due to it being stereo, background music, etc).

    But yeah, that file ISN'T 4.5MB/s unless it's like 72 channels... which I highly doubt, heh. Normal lossless is around 900-1100Kbp/s for a quality stereo track. Even uncompressed wave (16bit, 44100, stereo) is only 1400Kb/s (175KB/s).
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited June 2006
    Good call, I don't know why I wrote that but the compression figures you list are more realistic and are representative of what I normally get.

    -drasnor :fold:
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