iTunes Audio conversion from .wma to AAC

[ToiletDuck]

I have a paid subscription to napster and all of their songs are .wma. I wanted to use iTunes to play them but it says it has to convert them to AAC first. Will I lost any quality when doing this? Is .wma just a crappy codec to use for 128kb audio? Am I being cheated? :confused:

[Mug Funky]

hell yeah.

transcoding lossy to lossy is bad - it'll double the level of the artefacts, at least in theory. however, WMA has such a poor model of human hearing that encoding to something good like AAC might not hurt the sound too much (it's going to be poor to start with) - it might stay pretty much the same if you're lucky.

i can tell WMA9@192 from the original on human speech without even needing decent headphones (and in a noisy room at that). never bothered with an ABX because it would be too easy and the result would be meaningess (WMA sounds like a tin can underwater).

[bond]

1) reencoding to another lossy format will always hurt the quality!
you could maybe reencode to apples lossless audio codec alac in itunes without loosing quality, but this means the filesize will get much bigger

2) wma9 @ 128kbps provides clearly less quality than mp3 @ 128kbps (using lame) as prooven in rjamorims great quality comparison available here (http://www.rjamorim.com/test/multiformat128/results.html)
btw this comparison also shows that itunes' music store provides far better quality at the same bitrate (still not clearly beating mp3)
so yeah, buying wma9 audio at 128kbps is a joke

and vorbis rules them all

[SeeMoreDigital]

From what I remember, as soon as you drag and drop an WMA file into iTunes you are greeted with a "conversion message".

Agreed there will be some loss during the conversion process. So have you considered experimenting with other conversion applications and AAC codecs?

Foobar2000 does quite a good job at converting 2Ch WMA to 2Ch AAC (NeroDigital).


Cheers

[bond]

Foobar2000 does quite a good job at converting 2Ch WMA to 2Ch AAC (NeroDigital).itunes uses one of the best aac codecs available, why should using nero's encoder bring any advantage in this case?

[SeeMoreDigital]

itunes uses one of the best aac codecs available, why should using nero's encoder bring any advantage in this case?Agreed... I use iTunes myself... :)

However, we all have different preferences and some encoders provide tools for playing with the audio. For all we know ToiletDuck might prefer the slightly edgier sound of the Nero codec!


Cheers

[bond]

whats "edgier sound"? :confused: