When I try to play WMA files in an album it just skips through them until it finds a file type that it is happy playing - mp3 etc. If I try to play one WMA lossless file on its own it says something about the source like the file doesn’t exist. It appears WMA lossless isn’t supported?
I am desperate to be able to transfer all my music files to the hubs HD without losing any quality and preferably whilst retaining the album art. I have a good AV/HI-FI and use HDMI so bought the hub to get the best sound possible.
The bulk of my music files have been created as WMA (lossless) and carries the artwork which i would also like to keep. The total volume of these files works out about 170GB so that needs to be considered too.
General
Complete name : D:\Music\Bob Marley\Legend- Best Of Bob Marley\06 Get Up, Stand Up.wma
Format : Windows Media
File size : 17.5 MiB
Duration : 3mn 16s
Overall bit rate mode : Variable
Overall bit rate : 749 Kbps
Maximum Overall bit rate : 791 Kbps
Album : Legend: Best Of Bob Marley
Track name : Get Up, Stand Up
Track name/Position : 6
Performer : Bob Marley / Bob Marley & the Wailers
Composer : Bob Marley
Publisher : Polygram
Genre : Reggae
Recorded date : 1984
Encoded date : UTC 2009-03-01 03:16:16 / UTC 2005-09-09 23:48:38.218
Provider : AMG
WM/ProviderRating : 9
WM/ProviderStyle : Reggae
Audio
ID : 1
Format : WMA
Format profile : Lossless
Codec ID : 163
Codec ID/Info : Windows Media Audio
Description of the codec : Windows Media Audio 9.1 Lossless - VBR Quality 100, 44 kHz, 2 channel 16 bit 1-pass VBR
Duration : 3mn 16s
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 747 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
Stream size : 17.5 MiB (100%)
AverageLevel : 4219
Thanks for that - I’m begining to get concerned about the product now - I don’t get why it can’t support lossless WMA and FLAC doesn’t look ideal either - particularly if I have to convert 180GB of music that is in seperate folders…
Ok well if thats the case than I can understand, but surely there is a way to convert these files into another format that works with WD, doesn’t lose the album art and maintains the quality of the sound?
I understand MP3 only goes up to 320kbps…
Flac has issues with ordering (presumabely will be fixed by WD in the future) and will mean I lose all album art.
Ok well if thats the case than I can understand, but surely there is a way to convert these files into another format that works with WD, doesn’t lose the album art and maintains the quality of the sound?
I understand MP3 only goes up to 320kbps…
Flac has issues with ordering (presumabely will be fixed by WD in the future) and will mean I lose all album art.
Is there anything else worth considering?
Thanks for the help,
Adam
First, are these wma lossless files something you’ve downloaded or did you rip them from CDs? If you only have the wma files converting them from wma to FLAC will lose quality - it’s not recommended if you want the highest quality files.
If you have the original CDs you can get the best quality by ripping them to uncompressed .wav files. The .wav files should be playable on any media player and you don’t loose any quality. The bad news is that the files are very big, because they’re not compressed.
If you want smaller files but better quality than mp3, FLAC is pretty much the standard.
The HUB does play FLAC files. Unfortunately, WD has introduced a bug into the HUB firmware that plays the FLAC files in reverse order, but it’s simple to work around and maybe WD will fix the bug eventually.
Yeah it looks like FLAC is a possibility (I’m sure they will fix the bug at some point), but you don’t get to keep the artwork do you? I was reading that you might be able to create Folder.jpg or something to add the images - need to read more about this. It will also take ages by the looks of it.
I spoke to WD over the phone and the guy wasn’t sure why it wouldn’t play them as all file info looked fine. The are going to escalate the matter. I just can’t believe that its this hard to burn cds and keep them in good quality with the album art…
ATRAC is Sonys proprietary file format, I think even Sony has abandoned it and has gone to mp3. It also used Sonys horrible DRM protection. I definitely wouldn’t recommend using ATRAC. My recommendations are: wav for archiving. Should be playable on almost any system. Keep on a big hard disk. FLAC for medium size files with good quality. You can play both of these through your WD HUB and AV system. Use mp3 for portable players for small file size. These are pretty much universal standard formats for audio files.
ATRAC and wma are proprietary, I wouldn’t recommend using those formats for building a music collection.
badmem wrote:> FLAC will lose quality - it’s not recommended if you want the highest quality files.
Converting from one lossless format to another won’t lose quality. FLAC is lossless.
Okay Tony, but both wma and FLAC use lossless COMPRESSION, so the files are not identical to the original. If you convert from something that is compressed to a different format that is compressed you will lose some quality. A wav file is uncompressed and has all of the original information stored. If you want the highest quality you should start with an uncompressed file. The good thing about FLAC is that you can uncompress it back to a wav file. I don’t know if this is possible with wma lossless, I’ve never used it.
Bottom line if you only have the wma lossless files and they’re not supported on the HUB, then you will have to convert them and lose some quality. If it’s possible to uncompress the wma files to wav files, that’s a better option. If you have the original uncompressed wav files that is the best option that will give the best quality.
Having said that; at my age everything sounds the same quality wise
As an aside, the idea of lossless data compression is that when uncompressed it is identical to the original data. There is no loss of audio quality with losslessly compressed music.
