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Topic: Convert WAV to WMA lossless? My Car only plays MP3, WMA, AAC-LC - help (Read 22532 times) previous topic - next topic
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Convert WAV to WMA lossless? My Car only plays MP3, WMA, AAC-LC - help

Ok, here is a challenge for playing music in my car off of a USB stick, my requirements and constraints:

1 - I ripped my CD collection to WAV Lossless
2 - I currently use Foobar as my home medial player (to an outboard Benchmark DAC)
3 - My car can play music files on USB stick but only can play the following formats per my owner's manual:  MP3, WMA, AAC-LC

So a few questions.... go easy on me, I am a noob when it comes to these formats.... I am an audiophile and would like to use lossless files and I understand windows has a lossless option for their WMA format and it therefore, appears appealing to me. So, the following:

A - Is there a bulk converter for WAV to WMA lossless? I, for the life of me, cannot find one.
B - If such as converter does not exist, then what is the highest fidelity, least lossy format and associated bulk converter out there?  What format/configuration/bit rate/whatever....do you recommend given that my car can only play MP3, WMA, AAC-LC and my collection is ripped to WAV.

Thanx so much
Bruce in Philly
whttp://travelthroughpictures.com/

Convert WAV to WMA lossless? My Car only plays MP3, WMA, AAC-LC - help

Reply #1
Many, if not most, devices that support WMA don't support WMA lossless.

Convert WAV to WMA lossless? My Car only plays MP3, WMA, AAC-LC - help

Reply #2
Your car stereo cannot play WMA Lossless.

Convert WAV to WMA lossless? My Car only plays MP3, WMA, AAC-LC - help

Reply #3
I have a Sony CDX-GT660UP that supports the same formats MP3, AAC, WMA. However, it does not support HE-AAC, ALAC, or WMA lossless. If you're paranoid about lossy then just use MP3 V0 and be done with it. Personally, I use my iPhone (plugged in via USB) with 64kbps HE-AAC and it sounds fine to me in the car. As a bonus, my entire CD collection fits in about 5GB at that bitrate.

Convert WAV to WMA lossless? My Car only plays MP3, WMA, AAC-LC - help

Reply #4
Personally, since I can't abx lame -v2 at home, there's no reason to suggest I could do it in my car . Forget about audiophoolery and slap as much mp3 on your stick as you can and enjoy the ride.

Convert WAV to WMA lossless? My Car only plays MP3, WMA, AAC-LC - help

Reply #5
1 - I ripped my CD collection to WAV Lossless


And kept it as .wav? Not quite optimal ... except possibly it might be the only lossless format supported by legacy portable players. Which is a point if you can bring your entire collection that way, that is an offsite backup that is regularly tested ...

Convert WAV to WMA lossless? My Car only plays MP3, WMA, AAC-LC - help

Reply #6
I agree with everything that others said. Keeping music in WAV is pointless. Large file size and poor-to-none tag support. FLAC, ALAC, TAK, Wavpack or even WMAL are better choices. AIFF also stores uncompressed PCM but at least it has proper tag support.
But, just to answer OP question. You can use dbPoweramp to convert WAV to WMAL. It requires aditional WMA codec from Codec Central to be installed. Also check TAudio Converter. It may support WMAL, too. Although, it seams that you car player only supports lossy formats.

Convert WAV to WMA lossless? My Car only plays MP3, WMA, AAC-LC - help

Reply #7
If you're paranoid about lossy then just use MP3 V0 and be done with it. Personally, I use my iPhone (plugged in via USB) with 64kbps HE-AAC and it sounds fine to me in the car. As a bonus, my entire CD collection fits in about 5GB at that bitrate.


Thank you all so much for your input.  As you can probably tell, I don't use any portable player so I am a total noob when it comes to these formats.  I also don't own any Apple stuff.  Regarding my paranoia on lossy formats, I am extremely paranoid.  Just cut me a break on me being an audiophile and let me wallow in my sickness.  I am 54 now and started into music reproduction as a teenager and have always pursued hi fidelity. Today, I have beautiful sound systems in my home that can bring you (or me at least) to tears with the right music.  So, here is what I need (beside therapy), at least what I think I need:

1) A bulk converter that can preserve windows folder structure and that will allow multiple folders and sub folders (see more below)
2) A convert setting for the least lossy file formats (I downloaded and installed a few converters but I never saw "MP3 V0" ... used The Google and think I understand many consider it the "best" but again, I didn't see this option on the converters I had)

Regarding folders..... I use Foobar as my player (it could bypass the old XP sound kernel and has wonderful high performance library management required for my huge music collection (I paid for all of it)) and I use folder view.  I really don't care about tagging.  My library is organized on my Raided NAS by folder named by artist.... such as "Rolling Stones", then a sub-folder named for each album, and in those folders, each song by name prefixed with "01..02..03..." to preserver song order.  I would love to just drag and drop "Rolling Stones" folder into a converter and have it write to a new directory and duplicate the folder structure.  If I can't do this, I do have enough storage and time to say copy Rolling Stones to temp storage, run the converter to create each new file in place, then delete the original wav files.  Then I can drag the converted folder over to my high-capacity USB sticks.

If you are rolling your eyes reading the consequences of my audiophile sickness, the reason for much of it is because I was an early adopter.  Getting XP to pass an untouched, bit-fo-bit stream out of a computer to an outboard DAC before there were USB DACs was a big deal (I use, and still use a PC to an Accuphase CD player with a digital in).  I chose WAV because it was bit-for-bit and was supported by the big evil gorilla Microsoft.  I am an old IT guy and I have witnessed IT companies, formats, next big things, come and go and while I am no fan companies that strong arm markets, sometimes sticking with the big guys and bit-for-bit is a conservative strategy if you objective is to preserve for the long term.  It has worked well for me so far.

Again, thank you so much for your help.

Peace
Bruce in Philly

Convert WAV to WMA lossless? My Car only plays MP3, WMA, AAC-LC - help

Reply #8
Update to latest foobar2000: http://www.foobar2000.org/download
Install Free Encoder Pack: http://www.foobar2000.org/encoderpack
See wiki: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...r2000:Converter

Specify an Output path folder location such as C:\...\Music\MP3\
Because your WAV files don't have tags, your "Name format" will be %path% and you'll need to reorganize the resulting folder structure after conversion.

Try a few artist folders first to see what to expect. Take them out and play them in the car both to judge the quality and to see how your player handles track selection and display. If you need to tag your new MP3 files to have these functions work properly, foobar2000 can help with that as well.

Convert WAV to WMA lossless? My Car only plays MP3, WMA, AAC-LC - help

Reply #9
So a few questions.... go easy on me, I am a noob when it comes to these formats.... I am an audiophile and would like to use lossless files and I understand windows has a lossless option for their WMA format and it therefore, appears appealing to me. So, the following:

A - Is there a bulk converter for WAV to WMA lossless? I, for the life of me, cannot find one.
B - If such as converter does not exist, then what is the highest fidelity, least lossy format and associated bulk converter out there?  What format/configuration/bit rate/whatever....do you recommend given that my car can only play MP3, WMA, AAC-LC and my collection is ripped to WAV.

Thanx so much
Bruce in Philly



Hi Bruce,


I signed up to this forum to post this reply, since I was also looking for a quick and easy way to bulk-convert WAV to WMA Lossless. I might be a bit late for my reply to be helpful, but I found a solution which appears to work.

There is a program by Microsoft called "Microsoft Expression Encoder 4". It seems to be geared towards broadcast and web media production, but - if you ignore all the other functions - it also does exactly what you want.

You can find it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/de...s.aspx?id=18974

If you install it, open it and choose "transcoding project", you can go to "File > Import" and select a bunch of files. If you select them all in the box in the bottom-left, and then go over to the right of the window (where the box says "Encode"), you can choose WMA Lossless.

If you choose the "Output" tab, you can specify a folder for the converted files.

Then just press the "Encode" button (on the bottom-left of the window) and it will start producing WMA Lossless files from your WAVs.

I'm running a pretty quick PC with Windows 7, and it only takes a couple of seconds to convert each WAV file.

I hope this helps, or that you found an alternative solution.


Best wishes from Edinburgh,

Daniel.

Re: Convert WAV to WMA lossless? My Car only plays MP3, WMA, AAC-LC - help

Reply #10
@dwor/Daniel:

I registered just to thank you for the links/info.  Worked perfect on my 2017 Buick retarded Infotainment Center.
Best regards,
Jeff

Re: Convert WAV to WMA lossless? My Car only plays MP3, WMA, AAC-LC - help

Reply #11
I don't quite see the point in using lossless media in a car audio system. No matter the level of the car audio system, it's still gonna be sub-par to a decent home stereo system, or a decent pair of headphones.

So unless you're driving around in a living room, or with decent headphones on, using lossless files is kinda pointless, really.

Or maybe you're driving something a tad more exclusive, like a Bentley Phantom or something, where the inside has been basically outfitted like a recording studio (I've never sat in one, but I kinda doubt it'd still be on-par with stuff I mentioned above).

I see no reason to really go for high-quality audio copies for use in car audio equipment. Due to all the other noises coming from the car itself and outside, there's so much interference, and stuff, your audio files must be quite craptastic if you can hear the compression artifacts. Car audio speakers - no matter the quality - will never really amount to Hi-Fi home speakers of good quality, let alone headphones, either.

I'd simply make a couple tests to see which -Vx setting is just enough to become transparent to me, and use that. I kinda doubt that anything below -V4 is gonna produce noticeable artifacts in a car audio system.

Re: Convert WAV to WMA lossless? My Car only plays MP3, WMA, AAC-LC - help

Reply #12
@ polemon

I ripped my CD collection long before there were so many conversion possibilities.  I invested good money in my home audio sound system and want to listen to the best possible sound it is capable of producing.
I find it odd that a new vehicle will not play .wav files yet older vehicles of all makes and models have that ability.  It is an inconvenience for me to re-rip music files to another format just to play in the vehicle.  But now it is a necessary inconvenience...

Re: Convert WAV to WMA lossless? My Car only plays MP3, WMA, AAC-LC - help

Reply #13
It is an inconvenience for me to re-rip music files to another format just to play in the vehicle.  But now it is a necessary inconvenience...
You don't have to "re-rip" anything.  There are many programs that will take your existing WAV files and make copies encoded to MP3, AAC, or WMA.  You load the WAVs, press a button, and the new files are copied directly to your USB drive.