wma vs mp3 and editor

[shinnen]

Hi,
I have two questions.
1) Which is better wma or mp3. I'm just an ordinary listener with no special requirements.
2) What is a good editor for pasting wma or mp3 files together, so that they will play in succession, as one piece?
Thanks,
........ john

[steve]

Which is better wma or mp3.

What do you mean by "better"?
For sound quality, WAV and FLAC are better than either of them.
As a (highly) compressed format for music, Ogg Vorbis has the advantage of being open source.
For extreme compression of voice recordings, Speex is the best. http://www.speex.org/

Audacity is a good audio editor (although the deterioration in sound quality when working with lossy formats is cumulative).

[MDOC]

As a (highly) compressed format for music, Ogg Vorbis has the advantage of being open source.
For extreme compression of voice recordings, Speex is the best. http://www.speex.org/

And what do you mean by compression?

[steve]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_compression

[shinnen]

Hi,
"Which is better?" I just knew you'd ask what I mean by this. Well..... I'm not sure. I guess, sound quality at a comparable file size, in a 'common' format', a format that I can send to friends and expect that they won't have problems playing (music). I don't know if this helps.
When you say 'lousy formats' does that include mp3 and wma?
As regards an editor. This was a poor choice of terms. Right now I want to join together a few songs into one file, so that they'll play end to end, so to speak. WMP rips them from the cd in wma, so it would be nice if I can join those. I suppose I could convert them to something else, or rip them as mp3. I'm not really sure how to phrase this, but I hope you get the picture.
..... john

[steve]

I guess, sound quality at a comparable file size, in a 'common' format', a format that I can send to friends and expect that they won't have problems playing (music).

There is not much difference between Ogg, MP3 or WMA in terms of sound quality.
Ogg is possibly slightly higher quality,
MP3 is the most common,

When you say 'lousy formats' does that include mp3 and wma?

"Lossy" not "lousy".
Lossy vs. Lossless
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_compr ... ompression

Right now I want to join together a few songs into one file, so that they'll play end to end, so to speak. WMP rips them from the cd in wma, so it would be nice if I can join those

For sound quality, if you want, or may want to do any editing of the audio, it would be better to rip in a lossless format such as WAV. You can use "Exact Audio Copy" for the very best quality, or "C-Dex" for faster copies. Both programs are free.

You can then edit to your hearts content, and Export as WAV (for backup copies, or if you want to burn to CD) and/or MP3 for smaller files suitable for internet use and MP3 players.

If you use Audacity 1.3 there are Export pre-sets for the quality level for mp3 encoding. You will need to install LAME in order to export as mp3.
http://audacityteam.org/help/faq?s=inst ... m=lame-mp3

[shinnen]

Hi Steve,
Thanks for replying.
Lossy not Lousy. Oops! Sorry
So, in your opinion would I be better off using one of the program you mentioned, or Audacity?
....... john

[steve]

So, in your opinion would I be better off using one of the program you mentioned, or Audacity?

My recommendation would be to use Exact Audio Copy or C-Dex to rip the CD to WAV, then use Audacity to edit the ripped files. To export from Audacity as MP3, you will need to install LAME.
http://audacityteam.org/help/faq?s=install&i=lame-mp3

[shinnen]

Hi Steve,
Great! That's what I'll do then. I already have lame installed, so that's no problem.
Thanks,
... john

[shinnen]

Hi Steve,
Well, I downloaded Exact Audio Copy and extracted the 8 tracks I want to splice together; however Audacity would not open them all without crashing, so I saved individually to projects. But I still can't open them all together in Audacity (crash!). They a are total of 380 mbs, but mine is not a very powerful system (p3 1300 mhz/ 500 mbs ram). Is there anyway of putting these together?
Thanks,
John
P.S. CDex made my system crash (blue screen), and would not run. Perhaps because I'm using Windows ME. I don't know.