snaimpally

Since there are constant questions as to what format and rate people should use when ripping, I thought I'd do a comparison. I used the song "Just What I needed" from the Car's Complete Greatest Hits (Rhino). This song is 38MB on the CD (.wav). Note that I leave the sound quality issue up to users because depending on your circumstances, your requirements may vary. You may want to cram many songs at a lower rate/quality when going on vacation and fewer songs at a higher rate/quality when going to the office. Also, it depends on the quality your headphones are and what is the lowest quality your ears can tolerate.

I used Audio Grabber for all ripping except for WMA lossless and WMA VBR. I used WMA for the latter two.

Constant Bit Rate.

Time. I note that ripping using CBR is faster than ripping using VBR. CBR typically took 15-20 secs, while VBR took around 30 secs. So if time is important, consider using CBR.

File size. Blade and Lame produce virtually the same size files while WMA is slightly bigger. Have you ever noticed many mp3 players have a notice "This player can store 5,000 mp3 or 10,000 WMA songs" and then in fine print it says mp3 at 128kbps and WMA 64kbps. Microsoft is of course paying the mp3 player manufacturer to put this true but misleading piece of info on the packaging. WMA is less efficient encoding than mp3 for the same bit rate.

CBR Blade Lame WMA
320 8,825 8,819 N/A
256 7,061 7,062 N/A
192 5,296 5,296 5,324
128 3,530 3,531 3,557

As expected, the 128kbps encoded file size is half that of a 256 kbps file. Each 64kbps increase in rate increase file size by approximately 1,800 kb.

Variable Bit Rate
VBR
Lame VBR 0 6,818 WMA (470-940) 25,468
Lame VBR 1 6,200 WMA (240-355) 9,271
Lame VBR 2 5,784 WMA (135-215) 5,536
Lame VBR 3 5,338 WMA (85-145) 3,543


Note: Blade does not do VBR. The numbers in parenthesis after "WMA" indicate the kbps encoding range. I unfortunately don't know what the rates are for Lame. The highest WMA rate is their "lossless" rate - its saves you about 33% compared to the original 38MB wav file.

The WMA "best" (VBR 240-355) rate produces files that are bigger than CBR 320 so again, WMA is less efficient than MP3.

Lame VBR rates: Not a huge difference in file size with the different Lame VBR. File size increase by 500 kb at each level. You are probably better off encoding at the highest rate (VBR 0).

CBR vs VBR: Lame VBR 0 file size is just slightly less than the Lame/Blade CBR 256 size. So the real question is whether VBR 0 sounds closer to CBR 256 or CBR 320. If VBR 0 sounds closer to CBR 256, then you might as well do CBR because its much faster to rip because the file size difference is negligible. However, if VBR 0 sounds like CBR 320, then the file size difference is significant, so its better rip to VBR 0.

Bottom line is that mp3 is more efficient than wma and if you use VBR, you might was well stick with the best/highest rate. These are both surprising results that I had not expected.

I would welcome any listener comments on VBR 0 vs CBR 256 and CBR 320.