Exporting to WMA Lossless

[Rosickness12]

I see there are various losseless formats to choose from but wma losseless isn't one of them. Will this be a format option at sometime. There are reasons Flac and Wav isn't an option.

[kozikowski]

Windows Media - Audio is a compressed format. I believe it was one of the early MPEG4 programs. If I had to guess at it, Microsoft did that to avoid paying Fraunhofer the MP3 fees. As with MP3, I believe you can select high quality, but not uncompressed.

There are reasons Flac and Wav isn't an option.

Because you run out of room or transmission speed?

Compression isn't free. The compressed formats work by cleverly hiding the compression processing damage. The damage never goes away.

Koz

[steve]

I see there are various losseless formats to choose from but wma losseless isn't one of them. Will this be a format option at sometime.

Unlikely as Microsoft have never released format documentation.

You could export from Audacity as WAV, and then use Microsoft's "Expression Encoder 4" to convert to WMA lossless.
Note that mainstream support for Expression Encoder ended about 2 years ago.

As a matter of interest, why do you want to use a format that is so badly supported?

[Gale Andrews]

I see there are various losseless formats to choose from but wma losseless isn't one of them. Will this be a format option at sometime.

You can export WMA lossless from Audacity if you point Audacity to a suitable command-line encoder. See http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/FFmpe ... wma_export.


Gale

[Rosickness12]

Steve, my Ford Taurus doesn't play Flac at all and WAV audio doesn't display track, artist, or album info. All Wav in that car comes up as Unknown. If I had a choice I'd go with Flac. But while I have this car the only lossless format that works well with it is WMA Lossless.

[steve]

Are you sure that it supports WMAL? That's very unusual.

[Rosickness12]

Are you sure that it supports WMAL? That's very unusual.

It does. While testing all this, I had a blank flash drive. I'd put a few flac tracks on it and the car didn't recognize it at all. Various Ford forums and manuals didn't have Flac as supported audio. I then tried Wav and all tracks on wav came up unknown but they played. Just no information. Then I used audacity to export in wav. I took those wave files along with some Flac downloads and used a program called Skyshape Lossless Audio Converter. This only converts lossless to other lossless formats. Each audio file was about 40-60 mb which tells me these are losseless. The car has Microsoft Sync which makes sense to why it would play. It was a pain to get my flac audio to work properly in the car until the lightbulb went off and WMA + MS Sync= Success.

[steve]

In that case, Gale's suggestion looks like the best we can offer. Use the command line encoder from here:
https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,90519.0.html
and the "external program" export option: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/expo ... ogram.html

[DVDdoug]

Steve, my Ford Taurus doesn't play Flac at all...

....But while I have this car the only lossless format that works well with it is WMA Lossless.

What's wrong with regular lossy WMA?

Lossy doesn't mean "terrible". I've never used WMA, but good high-bitrate AACs & MP3s can often sound identical to the lossless original. I assume the same is true with WMA. Some of the best sounding music I have is on concert DVDs (5.1 channel Dolby AC3 or DTS... both lossy).

Even if you can hear a difference, you usually have to do some careful A/B listening to hear the difference. Most people who think MP3 "sounds terrible" have never done any proper scientific, blind, level-matched ABX listening tests, or they've only been listening to low-quality MP3s. That includes a lot of audio professionals who think the difference is obvious... If they've done blind listening tests, they would at least admit that it can be very hard to hear the difference.

But while I have this car the only lossless format that works well with it is WMA Lossless.

If lossless is that important you can change the car stereo without changing the car. And, you can always have lossless at home.