Hi all, if you're wondering what music format to use for your pda, you might find this useful. Hopefully this might answer some questions you have.
First off, I'm going to tell you what I use and why. Some of you more experienced Audiophile'rs will probably disagree with some of my findings but that is ok, you are entitled to your opinions. But please don't forget, for the normal joe out there that don't have Audiophile ears this is a good alternative. By the way - Audiophilers are people that are very sensitive, keen or atuned to sound and music, they often can hear differences in music/sound that most people cannot hear. I also possess some of the attributes of an Audiophile, I can hear very high frequencies or electronic signals that most people can't hear.
Ok. When I first bought my pda, I was excited to know that it will be taking over my rinky dinky Rio 32 MB MP3 player :). With a big CF card the possibilites are endless when it comes to MP3 music. Well, that fell short because MP3's add up after awhile in file size and before I knew it, my 128 mb CF card was full. It's like money, the more you have, the more you will spend. The alternative? buy a bigger memory card, well, I'm not made of money, so I started looking for other solutions.
I noticed that WMP in my PocketPC will also play .wma (Windows Media Audio). I wanted to find out what this format was all about and after a couple of days of researching I found that you can convert an MP3 file to a .WMA file to half the size without much quality loss (to my ears anyways). There are several free conversion utils out on the net you can download, I will list the one I use below. THIS IS GREAT NEWS! I can now convert all my MP3's to WMA's and fit twice as much on a 128 MB CF card. Audiophilers are probably saying, "euww, wma" well, guys/gals, to my ears there really isn't much difference, remember we came from a cassette Walkman era, this is still 10 x better :). IMHO, I find that the WMA at a higer bitrate is very close to an MP3. I think once you get to 64kbps bitrate you can start to hear some hollowness to the song, I find that 96 kbps is best.
Last week, I was roaming around the forums and saw some postings on this other format.. OGG. So, I had to find out what it was all about. To my surprise, the OGG is very much like the .wma format except to my findings the compression for OGG is a bit better. I've done some comparisons and the wma format converted using 96kbps bitrate is equivalent to the 64kbps bitrate in the OGG format, so in another words, the compression is better on the OGG and as far as I can hear, the quality is better too. This excellent news, now I can compress the file smaller and retain same quality format.
So, in conclusion, the OGG format is better in compression and quality compared to the .WMA format but of course not as good as the raw MP3 format. This is a given when you compress anything at that rate you will no doubt sacrifice some quality. Playing OGG, WMA files on my Dell through the external speakers is a bit rough but that's just the cheap speakers most pda uses, but when you listening through the strereo headphones with a half decent hearphone, it's very good in either format.
My point? well, for all of you that cannot afford buying larger memory cards and want to utilize what you have, I think that using either wma or ogg format is a good solution.
Software to use for OGG/WMA:
1. I use
dbPowerAmp Converter to convert all my OGG or WMA files. It's a great app and it's free. Plus it's supported with a ton of third party Codecs for conversion. Make sure when you use this app that you install the Windows Media Audio Codec and the Ogg Vorbis Codec.
2. To play Ogg files on your PocketPC, you'll need
WinAmPAQ .92, it's a WinAMP clone for the PocketPC. This app is also freeware.
3. For .WMA files you just use the Windows Media Player that came with your PocketPC. You can also use the dbPowerAMP converter to convert wma files.
Well, this is brief but to the point, I hope this helps many of you, I know I didn't really get into details with format bitrates but I think it would probably confuse more new users then help :). The best thing to do is to convert some files into OGG, WMA and MP3 and play them on your PocketPC and you can judge for youself which format suits you best.
Good Luck!