MP3 & WMA: The Best of Both Worlds
The choice of MP3 or WMA depends on what you want to do with the files – modern software for video and audio editing can deal with WMA as easily as MP3, so the real question is what your audio player can handle. All Windows Mobile players obviously support WMA – in fact, basically every audio player on the planet supports WMA, except the most popular one of all: the iPod (what’s really interesting is that the chipset supports WMA but Apple disables it). If you want to have the flexibility to get an iPod in the future, rip to MP3. If you could care less, WMA is fine. And WMA will also save you space – you can generally go down one or two notches in bit rate with WMA and have it sound just as good. So if you decided that a 192kbps MP3 sounded perfect, a 160kbps or 128kbps WMA will likely sound nearly identical – but with smaller file size.
But what if I were to tell you that having the best of both worlds was possible? Windows Media Player 10 has a really cool feature that many people don’t know about – it’s called per-device transcoding. The word “transcoding†simply means to take something in one format and re-encode it in another format. So taking an MP3 and turning it into a WMA is transcoding. Where this becomes useful is when you want to rip your CDs in one format, but listen to them on your Windows Mobile device in another format…
Read this tutorial written by Jason Dunn (ThetwoInchView.com) for more!
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