question

[piranhaleg]

ok i had a song that was 1412kbps(wav) and made changed the same song to (ogg)268kbps. which is the better quality? does the space of downloading to the iriver120 stay the same (trying keep medium sound with minimal storage use).

[dang]

WAV will always be better quality, because it's uncompressed. MP3/WMA/OGG are compressed, hence not as good quality as a straight wave. The downside is that WAV take up about 10MG per minute, were as 128Kbps MP3 take up about 1MG per minute. Not sure for OGG, but at 268, it's probably slightly more then 1MG per minute (not positive though.)

I believe the iRiver iHP-120 supports WAV (and doesnt transcode when uploading the files to the iHP-120), so WAV's will take up a considerable amount of space.

There is no need to use WAV's unless you plan on doing some type of edits to the file, just encode to a compressed format.

[piranhaleg]

Im converting my cds to computer. All the songs seem to come out to wav format. Im using roxio6 and it gives me the option of changing the format to ogg or wms.

[ECA]

There are a few considerations.
How good do you wish it to sound. Medium quality for MP3 is about 256bps.
You may wish to sample the sounds to Wave, then change them to MP3, in different compressions. This will give you the best Idea HOW the music will sound. And you can decide which you like.
You may go for a Higher BPS for better sound, and loose abit of space.

[piranhaleg]

128bps is fine by me. I can do this with mp3 and wma right? Ogg seems to be in the 250range and wave too high at 1400s
but 128mp3 and 128 wma are the same quality right?

[llbbl]

Originally posted by piranhaleg
128bps is fine by me. I can do this with mp3 and wma right? Ogg seems to be in the 250range and wave too high at 1400s
but 128mp3 and 128 wma are the same quality right?

No the WMA uses a different coding standard based on MPEG4 or something, In that situation the WMA will sound better. No one wants to support MSFT if they don't have to, so OGG or MP3 >256 is your best choice.

[dang]

Well, the quality of different codecs at 128kbps is all up to the person listening. Most people can't really tell a difference at 128kbps. I would recommend getting something different to rip your cd's with though. You have Windows Media player (WMA only unless you purchase their mp3 upgrade.) RealOne Player (allows encoding up to 96kbps, but there is a free download to allow it to rip high-bit rate as well), and MusicMatch are decent tools. They all have a database type design that allow you to keep track of your songs within the application itself.

Not many devices support OGG, so think about that before ripping all your music to it. I would not rip all your music to WAV, cause you are going to run out of disk space rather quickly.