What's better, MP3 or WMA?

[flaninacupboard]

LD-R was a short lived industrial only format, which could only record 30 minutes to a disc. in short, it was crap.
But then again what do you expect, Laserdisc was out before CD!

check here for tons of info!
http://www.laserdiscarchive.co.uk/

[Cornucopia]

flaninacupboard,

having worked with Laserdisc, I can tell you that not only was it NOT CRAP, but up until the DVD, it was the BEST consumer format available.

Your specs are messed up--
LD's came in 2 flavors CAV (constant angular velocity--like LP) and CLV (constant linear velocity--like CD). You can pack alot more onto CLV. So,...

CAV could hold 30 min./side (and almost ALWAYS had 2 sided)
CLV could hold 60 min./side (also 2 sided)

Both had composite ANALOG video, with roughly 500 x 400 resolution. Not as good as full D1 DVD, but better than SVCD, VCD, VHS and was uncompressed.

Audio was better--either FM quality Analog Stereo/Dolby Surround, with CX or Dolby Noise reduction, or CD quality Digital Stereo tracks, or both. Later ones could add AC3 5.1 (with the loss of one of the previously mentioned tracks).

LD's had trick-play and search capabilities that is equal only to DVD.

I wish most of my stuff was that "crappy".

Oh, yeah, Laserdiscs came out in 73-75 and have been around until now. Doesn't seem that short lived to me.

Anyway, back on topic (sort of).
For my money the best sounding encoder for MP3 is the plugin for ProTools (~$20 extra). Far and away.

Scott

[NightWing]

And for fun they did make a recordible LD player. The cartridges were humongus! But were rewritable. record up to around 20 minutes I think. Been 12 years on that tech!

The really trick machine were the level 3 with a F8 processor on board with data encoded on the disk. Level 2 being a interface only with an external computer control { IE dragonlair } and level 1 being consumer systems.

The CAV could stop on a fram but had 30 minuts max on a side with CLV being 1 hour or 50 if digital audio used but could not pause on a frame. With frame capture added freeze frame for CLV playing.

Here is the key to audio. Anything that comprsses audio does so at the risk of artifacts. Like a jpeg picture. If you do digital photos you know you dont edit in jpeg as the transfer but use a lossless format like tiff. Else you start introduceing junk on every save pass. For the best audio strate raw capture and save works the best.

[EddyH]

(talking to everyone here. forgive the now-usual stream of conciousness bullshit)

Just thinking about ATRAC... also a good compression codec, if you get a recent one - there's another one that's been thru X number of generations. First gen ATRAC was atrocious for a 'near CD quality' device, about the same level as the 105kbit option in realplayer - "ATRAC1" is very, very old and very, very busted.. But since then there's been ATRAC2, 4, Type R, and now Type S, oh yeah and ATRAC3 which is (was? perhaps also superceded now) used in the LP recorders. Type R seems almost indistinguishable from CD on my now-old portable, good enough to master a disc from when there was no other alternative for getting the sounds from the source to the PC, though you could tell if you listened *really*really* hard on purpose for distortion, and did evil things to the frequency spectrum. Type S probably uses some kind of black magic
The "280kbit" rate - actually 292kbit - is full MD rate so you can be sure it should sound good now

Pixel, what do you mean about the LP modes being "dual channel"? My understanding was that ATRAC was designed from the ground up as having only one channel per bitstream, so mono mode plays the one stream, and stereo is actually playing back two separate streams multiplexed together at double rate. There are then the two special things about the LP modes: first is that they work very similarly to SP, but at half the data rate (losing about a 10% 'kludge tax' overhead on actual MDs though ) - LP2 runs at half speed and uses two totally separate (66kbit) mono channels for quite impressive sound considering the bitrate, and very good stereo. LP4 also runs at half speed, using just the one mono channel, and incorporates the second special (to ATRAC) thing. It squeezes somewhat dodgy stereo and overall sound into what would otherwise be a pretty good mono stream, using joint stereo encoding similar to, but a still a little more clever than, MP3.

So long play only 'half' uses the dual (?) / joint stereo mode. LP2 doesnt (and I record most my minidiscs using it - sounds far, far better than 90% of tapes. 17.6khz response can be told from CD but beats most cassettes, and the distortion is definately less noticable than tape hiss.. plus.. 150/162 minutes rather than 63/93/123!), but LP4 does (and is only useful in a handful of cases - mostly for mono/slight stereo sources without much need for high treble, like dictation, or recording of old elvis tunes or 64k mono net mp3s). Mmkay?

If they've kept up the R&D on the long play modes thru ATRAC-R into ATRAC-S, then it could be a whole lot better now. Hope the boffins in the Sony lab also spent a little time on incorporating a program-play mode, and a random shuffle play that, well, is actually random, rather than just playing 1-4-7-2-5-3-6-9-10-8 every time you press play... on every. single. disc.
Or indeed a way to get the ATRAC sounds off the disc without using an analogue cord, or a digital link with a copyright hacking cable. Both ways the sound has to be decoded at least once before anything else can be done Course, there's always the option of getting hold of an old minidisc data drive and having some software adventures, but the things are like hens teeth made out of gold dust now.

The ATRAC decoding CD players are... interesting. Certainly how the more expensive of them seem to be smaller than early recording minidisc portables which surely can't be possible given the limits of "being big enough to hold a CD". Wonder what 176kbit mode sounds like? (And how they came up with it, seeing as 66+132=198). Maybe not as good as full 264 or 292, but should still be schweet. And you'd get a lot of music on one disc.
And yes, they're in the UK. I only know of their existance by 'accidentally' wandering into the new Sony store in my town - before they had even 'officially' opened

DivXexpert - did you see that there's now a home direct-to-vinyl recording product now available? You just plug in a mic or other source, get yourself a wax disc, get it spinning, place the needle (and engage the tonearm-moving mechanism..), and jam away. Course, it costs high-four, maybe five figures, and you need to go find somewhere to get it pressed if you want it to last more than ten plays or so, but it's the cool-value of the thing more than anything. "Dude, look, i have a vinyl recorder...". Sounds interesting in much the same way as the recordable Laserdisc - technology that works, and does so really quite well, but is so strange and expensive that it's really more of a novelty toy than a useful tool for 90% of those who buy it.
And my grandad still has a reel to reel tape player. At highest speed you get little recording time, but he swears the quality is the best (and very low noise on those 1/2" tapes). Wouldn't let me near the thing though

And you say that the Extreme settings with Lame sound great.. for about 100-120mb per 80 minutes, which is like 160-192kbit equivalent. Very interesting. Been a while since I played with any new Lame settings (still on... whichever that preset with the 3 in it was ). Can't stop progress.

("WMA is terrible on speakers, but fine on headphones" - i cant quite grasp how that would work for a codec rather than the other way round, but it seems to happen a lot for radiohead in general so it could be true)

Flan, you're worried about compressing your music any further when 320kbit is already 4.4:1 ?? If you knew how much mpg compressed video you'd be off these boards like a shot

Mike, why try to save space on 5gb of mp3s, unless your hard disc is small? Mine take up about 80gb.. mostly at 128k.. and at least 20gb of which is totally legit

MP3 that loses bass, fullness, rolls off the treble at all bitrates? You really need to change your encoder (and possibly player). Rolling off treble at low rates is usually necessary, but the other two aren't, and if you use high rates and/or VBR you can get full spectrum, or save some bits by going close to full as makes no difference to your own ears. I have some mp3s with -very- deep/loud/involved bass and it doesn't seem to have done them any harm with my own encoders. And I don't tend to use bass boost much with my mp3s
Those from some downloaded file though, ouch, there are some really nasty encoders out there, especially in terms of what they do to the treble, and that elusive "fullness".

Ogg, forgot about that one... which may be the problem. It's fast, works well, and does indeed sound damn good even at 128k CBR (and incredible at about 160k abr) without any trickery like WMA pulls. However, despite the support slowly growing, it may have come just a little too late to gain mass acceptance and compatibility A little like VHS, and IBM/Apple, MP3 has won by dint of being the first - or at least, the first well working codec to capture the public eye.

Ahhhhhh... Whats that horrible buzzing/whining noise coming from this PC all of a sudden?!?! Time to get that new HD ordered pronto.

[EddyH]

holy shit that was big. as im too far gone to edit i hand the scissors over to anyone who wants em. have fun.

[indolikaa]

12,000+ WMA files, but they are recorded at 160 kbps. No complaints about sound quality to this point...

[vitualis]

MiniDisc players (expect for the newer long play models) use the ATRAC-1 codec. The long-play modes (e.g., in NetMD) as well as the newer Sony products use the ATRAC-3 codec.

Not strictly true, ATRAC4 was out before 1997, type-R followed shortly after, and "ATRAC-3" was just picked to sound a bit like "MP3" which is a bit silly really.

Actually, I think you will find that you are actually talking about ATRAC-1 version 4 (and there is version 4.5 and more). All standard MD players (except in long play modes which use ATRAC-3) use a version of ATRAC-1. The newer "ATRAC" walkman's and such use ATRAC-3 (which as you say, is because it sounds like MP3).

@ vance: I completely disagree that the difference between MP3 at 320 kbit/s and source CD-DA is "night and day". That is completely bollucks unless one of the conditions I wrote before applies. You have to test it in a hardware neutral way which involves decoding the MP3 first and re-burning it as a standard audio CD.

As for magazine tests, I don't put much faith in their findings. Usually their encoding methods are flawed and very rarely do they use proper blinding techniques. If you could post a link to such a tests, I would be interested in having a look and will critique it.

Regards.

[flaninacupboard]

Cornucopia,
You've no need to try and defend the old Laser. look under my avatar at my member status, i love the things
I was most pleased the other day when a friend came round the other day as i was watching my pioneer CAV special of natural born killers, and he said "hmm, makes you wonder why they bothered with DVD?"

My comments were aimed solely at LD-R, the recordable discs. And really the comments were based on the practicality of the format as opposed to VHS/SVHS, not the quality. LD-R would win hands down in that respect, but given you only get 30 mins of record time, and can't do anythting with the recording directly(still need to capture it in some way) it's pretty useless. and last i saw the discs were £100's each.

Oh, and you forgot that they also support DTS :P
And that some jap discs were anamorphic :P
and that some PAL discs have teletext extras :P

I was going to try and find the date they switched from the laservision badge to Laserdisc, but didn't have the time, nonetheless, it was the early 80's.

Eddy, (is Edward your real name? Mine is, although people tend to call me Edd.)
I know how compressed MPEG is, and it does make me sad
I was really hoping the next home entertainment format would go back to analogue (no compression, more difficult to pirate) but alas, we're stuck with MPEG again. what really ticks me off is digital cable and "freeview", they're supposed to be superior, digital and wonderful. but they all look like crap! switch over to kerrang TV and tell me the sound on it is better than nicam broadcast. or try watching wimbledon on the BBC through your aerial and on digital. i know which is better

Music is important to me, if it's available uncompressed i'll take it. when you spend £1500+ on hardware, you don't want crappy compressed audio.
Actually, i can soon make that £2000+, i want another power amp so i can bridge them 8)

[pixel]

@EddyH. Sorry I was getting mixed up, you are right it was joint-stereo, not dual channel

I was trying to point to the fact that SP and LP2 mode were recorded in "true" stereo (4 channels) and LP 4 is joint-stereo with the channels merged (2 channels), or so that is what I've read. This is why I choose only SP or LP2.

[peregrin]

Frankly i can't hear the difference , tin ear here, but i prefer to use mp3, and avoid using microsoft products as much as possible, if some one makes and alternate product I use it, other then the OS

peregrin ,

PS

I haven't used apple products since 1990

[phinsman]

One negative about WMA that I can tell you is that no matter how widespread its use seems to be now, compared to MP3 it is still going to give you compatibility problems.

Examples:

Most car CD players which play MP3 do not play WMA (some play both)

Not all personal MP3 players play WMA.

If you use Nero (at least before Version 6; I haven't tried it) you have to have the WMA plugin to burn songs from that format.

One of the late 2.x versions of Winamp won't play WMA unless you install video support (STUPID).

It is difficult to edit WMA tags unless you're using Windows Media Player. Winamp 2.x did not; not sure about Winamp 3.

Anyway that's my two cents.

It's the same thing, but worse, with the Ogg Vorbis format. Probably a much better format but you're not going to play it in your car or anything.

Dale

[PlasticDVDr]

WMA is far worse then MP3...

It all depends on what you're using to listen to them with. If you're still using your (cheap) computer speakers you wont be able to tell the difference very accurately...

However I have my PC hooked up to my JVC Receiver and WMA's sound metallic and sort of like the music is being played under water where a MP3 even at lower bitrates (128-192) sounds far better!

[EddyH]

K pixel, gotcha, soz for the misunderstanding.. now just gotta get time to read and decipher your question about your ATI, AWI, whatever it was

hmmm, analogue format would have been nice, just dont know if it would be possible to retain any useful quality going considerably smaller than the formats we already had, like VHS/Laser. ED-Beta was interesting, almost DVD quality, but needed a metal tape (remember those chrome / metal audio cassettes?) and ran at full original speed rather than the more common 1/2 or 1/3 - so only an hour of play. And was still a relatively bulky 1/2 inch format in the end. broadcast expansion using analogue almost definately impossible... why else did japan only have one HDTV channel other than the massive bandwidth it used?

If only the corps didnt get greedy and try to strangle the maximum amount of clone shopping / sports / movie-on-demand channels out of the available space things would be a lot better. A high-rate digital cable channel looks great... a low rate one is uglier than any analogue snow and even high-viewer channels like Sky One get the bitrate shru-off sometimes

Can't exactly do a side-by-side analogue/digital comparison right now though - the cable box is playing up on all five analogue channels (as well as Bravo, Scifi and a couple other satellite ones) in that it plays for fifteen seconds or so then blanks the screen and kills the audio. Very nice. So any analogue programs have been watched the old fashioned way - with little loss of enjoyment i must say

[flaninacupboard]

well, a laserdisc would hold around 4.5 gigabytes of data. so using a DVD-9 you'd have a 2 hour disc with exactly the same quality as a 12" laser, on a 12cm disc. and that's with PCM audio.
i think a dual layer disc with 5mhz of chromiance data and 1.44 mbps of audio data on one layer with 6.5 mhz of luminance data on the other layer would be a great format! It would easily smoke even the best DVD in both sound and picture, the only drawback being if you want more than an hour the disc must be double sided.

A nice alternative would have been to leave off a few months till lasers were more sophisticated, and use a quad layer system. a red layer, green layer, blue layer and an audio layer. Try pirating that!
I really think combining a home video delivery system and a pc data delivery system was an awful idea.

[EddyH]

How are you getting that 4.5gb figure? And um... doesn't a DVD9 have just a *little* more than 4.5gb??
Anyway, that's a very interesting idea...! Shows there's more than one way to look at things.

One layer (red) for the audio.. the next (green) for the colour info... and the finest one (blue) for the b/w resolution. Smart.. and with a bit of trickery you could probably get two hours out of that. Make it double sided (with a twin-head reader) for four hours... hmm! Be a bit thick, but thats not really a great problem. Three DVD9's stacked on top of each other dont make a big dent in space-time; and look how thin CD walkmans are these days. Put two of them together and it's still not as thick as a single cheap DVD transport.
The problem might be editing... and the linearity and single-purpose nature of the format - losing accurate random access and inclusion of non-video data, like DVD offers. (But then... what is 99% of anything you care to see on a DVD, whether feature or extras? why, its AV data played in sequential order just gotta find a way to squeeze in all those subtitles and extra audio tracks). As well as error correction / anti-skip buffers. Can't say I've ever been exposed to a scratched laserdisc, what's the effect like? Invisible? Recoverable? Or a major detriment to the video quality?

(hey.. maybe a fourth, UV or IR layer for a massive / modest amount of digital data, inc tracking info, menus/interactives, subs etc)

time to get rich and develop it

[flaninacupboard]

I arrive at my 4.5gig figure like this!
NTSC discs have two audio tracks and 1 video track. the video is 3.5mhz. Pal has 1 video track and 1 audio track. the video it 5mhz. so that's 1.5mhz per audio track then. so the discs have 6.5mhz of data. to represent that digitally would take 13million bits. so 12.39mbps. so at an hour per side, it's actually 5.4gigs, not 4.5. crappy memory

Yeah, DVD 9 is what, 8.6gigs or so? a single side of a laser is only one hour in play time, so you'd need two layers to get two hours.
The idea of the tri layer colour system was literally, red data on one, blue on another, and green on the last. RGB analogue!
Yeah, double sided would be cool. as long as all players were double sided so the "top" layer cuold have it's spiral reversed, switching sides would be as simple as changing layers!
Yeah, it loses out on error correction. scratched lasers aren't too pretty
If it's a tiny scratch affecting only one pit, you see a white speckle. just looks like a bit of dirt on the interpositive. Big scratches, especially on CAV discs are bad. if you have a big scratch running for say 100 tracks on a CAV disc, you see the same white speck in the same place for four seconds. doh. on a CLV disc though, the spekle dances across the screen a line at a time.

I just had a scan thorugh my star wars LD capture to show you an example. couldn't find one! guess they're in better condition that i thought.......

[pixel]

K pixel, gotcha, soz for the misunderstanding.. now just gotta get time to read and decipher your question about your ATI, AWI, whatever it was

hmmm, analogue format would have been nice, just dont know if it would be possible to retain any useful quality going considerably smaller than the formats we already had, like VHS/Laser. ED-Beta was interesting, almost DVD quality, but needed a metal tape (remember those chrome / metal audio cassettes?) and ran at full original speed rather than the more common 1/2 or 1/3 - so only an hour of play. And was still a relatively bulky 1/2 inch format in the end. broadcast expansion using analogue almost definately impossible... why else did japan only have one HDTV channel other than the massive bandwidth it used?

If only the corps didnt get greedy and try to strangle the maximum amount of clone shopping / sports / movie-on-demand channels out of the available space things would be a lot better. A high-rate digital cable channel looks great... a low rate one is uglier than any analogue snow and even high-viewer channels like Sky One get the bitrate shru-off sometimes

Can't exactly do a side-by-side analogue/digital comparison right now though - the cable box is playing up on all five analogue channels (as well as Bravo, Scifi and a couple other satellite ones) in that it plays for fifteen seconds or so then blanks the screen and kills the audio. Very nice. So any analogue programs have been watched the old fashioned way - with little loss of enjoyment i must say

I have to admit analogue definitely looks better, but I just don't have good TV reception, so Freeview is the choice for me.

The reason some digital channels appear worse than others depends on what other channels they are grouped with.

There are 5 channels in a multiplex (a multiplex being the frenquency that 1 analogue channel would take up) and each channel is given an average bitrate, but channels with high motion on them can take bitrate from another channel.

Hence why a program with relatively little motion can appear with many artifacts.

So if a music channel gets grouped with four gardening channels, the music channel will look pretty good, but the gardening channel could look like crap.

This is how it works for Freeview, and I'm assuming it is the same method in cable and satellite transmissions.

(Sorry, I know this is an MP3/WMA discussion, so I will stay on topic in the future.)

[flaninacupboard]

on topic, off topic, random topic- Who cares?
I was reading some info on NTL, who've been having some problems with cedrtain channels. Turns out that NTL ask for the programs in MPEG format and transcode them to be compatible with their hardware live. so not only a realtime encode, but a real time transcode. nice.......
Explains why all the shopping channels look so bad, they're probably doing their real time encode on some cheapass PC in the corner

[pixel]

We all know that the broadcasts are encoded in real-time, but is it not a bit stupid to ask for the programs already in MPEG and transcode them?

Great way to work it. Get a broadcast standard MPEG, churn up the quality even more, and make customers pay for it?

That would seem stupid even to a kid.

[flaninacupboard]

yet that is what they do!

It's mainly because they run two seperate and incompatible networks, one serving london and i think Birmingham, the other, everywhere else.

[EddyH]

But then aren't NTL famed for being generally crap at everything anyway?


Flan, if the data is running at 6.5mhz, wouldn't you need 13.0mbit/sec to represent it... assuming it's only on/off data and there's no top-end falloff? (still around 5.4gb tho )Which would be the sensible thing to store it as on an analogue medium. Or perhaps a simple FM / MFM / RLL type.
Or, let's say, you're considering what the raw video data would need, and want 8 bit resolution on each of those.. no.. actually as you've got audio (two channels taking 0.75mhz each??? thats a *lot* for sound..) and "only" chroma/luma signals rather than full RGB.. say 16bit.

Which comes to.. um.. some huge amount ... 26mbytes/sec to be easy. Yow. Which is a lot of gigabytes for an hour of vid, i'm pretty sure i dont need to tell you that.

And now i'm lost.. too many numbers.

The way you describe the effects of a damaged laserdisc, it sounds almost beautiful though, better than the sheer Ugly produced by an unrecoverable digital error, or even the corruption bands on VHS. A straight radial scratch just makes a small part of the picture drop out.... or shift around slowly. Like watching a film with a small scratch that is somehow reproduced on each frame. Hmm...

[Jester700]

ATRAC has gone through several versions in its lifetime, and can sound very good; IMO equal to high bitrate MP3.

MP3 at 320k is kind of silly IMO. You're over halfway to lossless compression with Monkey Audio or something at that level, so why not stay uncompressed?

If you need to go low bitrate (96k & under, say), MP3Pro is OK. WMA works too, but why support m$? But really, neither is very good - it's all about small size with those.

I like the more modern MP3 derivatives for PC use. Lame or Musepack at extreme settings sound great at around 200k.

Vinyl sucks.

High def CD & DVD audio is interesting, but to a certain extent unnecessary. In most normal listening environments with popular music (that is, the VAST majority of the buying public), a well recorded & mastered CD is enough and audibly indistinguishable from the better formats. IMO, of course. Now, if you have top gear and an acoustically designed & soundproofed room, or some nice phones, yeah. The greater bit depth is nice, especially on acoustic music. But that's catering to a small part of the buying public.

[Jester700]

So over all, MP3 sounds better on good speakers and WMA sounds good on headphones right? All my songs on my computer are MP3 Lame 320kbps CBR. Should I change it to VBR? Using Blade or Lame to encode the MP3 file? Will converting MP3's from CBR to VBR save me more space? Usually a typical song to me is around.. 10~15MB. Would a VBR MP3 file be a smaller size and sound better? Or should I just stick with my Lame CBR files?

MP3 at high bitrates sounds better than WMA on anything, IMO.

Don't use Blade - it's old tech. Use the LAME alt presets. Standard is good, but extreme is better. They won't be better than 320k CBR, because the bitrate will likely never get that high. But the extreme setting should be audibly equal, but at less cost in space (maybe 25% smaller). I wouldn't convert them - that generation loss might give audible artifacts. Either re-encode from the original sources, or leave them at 320k.

[Yirkin]

What about aac and ogg? will they replace mp3 soon?

Howard

[thayne]

What about aac and ogg? will they replace mp3 soon?

Howard

No chance. MP3 is too popular.

[Yirkin]

How about in the long run? Sorry don't mean to change the subject but it it somewhat releated to this topic.

Howard

[thayne]

I have heard ogg is better, but better didn't make beta kill vhs. ogg's will always be there, but mp3 I think will always be more popular. aac probably won't go anywhere except on itunes.com because of it's drm capabilities. People don't like restrictions, thats another reason mp3 is better than wma...

[pixel]

The sound card in your PC will also affect the music. I have some 128k mp3's on my PC at the moment and they sounded fine on my onboard sound and a sound blaster live 5.1, but on a sound blaster audigy 2 there was clear distortion.

[Cornucopia]

Actually, I have a feeling that AAC/MP4 will take off in the future, but not on std. computers. It'll be popular w/ PDA's and consumer devices.

Also, just because it has DRM "capabilities" doesn't mean that any particular file is going to include them. If you get your own encoder and make your own rips from your own CD's, you don't have to include the "copy protection" flag, unless I'm very much mistaken. MPAA/RIAA, OTOH, will be sure to do that!

Scott

[CoffeeGuy]

This looks like an old topic, and I dont really have an opinion on compressed files. But a response to the "vinyl is king & reel to reel aint that bad either", I say, Those VHS tapes that are collecting dust make great recordings in an average hi-fi VCR. And a lot more conveinent that reel to reel too.