MP3 vs. WMA

There are only a few audio compression formats out there, just as there are only a few image compression formats (you may have heard of them: JPG, GIF, BMP). Two of the most popular audio formats are WMA, or Windows Media Audio and MP3 (short for MPEG, Moving Pictures Experts Group, Audio Layer 3). WMA is the older audio format, produced by Microsoft, to work with Microsoft Windows Media Player. The WMA compression format was designed specifically for this format, and therefore can not be converted to other audio formats.

The sound quality of WMA and MP3 audio formats tends to be significantly different. WMA is a decent quality audio format when streaming speed telephone line (perhaps 30 Kbps or so). At this speed reaches almost WMA FM a level of sound quality, even if not entirely. At 128 kbps, Microsoft claims that WMA is nearly CD quality, although many would deny this. WMA, however, should not be fully discussed above. The compression provides relatively small audio files and require less processing power to run. It therefore remains a niche resulting decline in MP3 format has become the most popular and widely used.

The MP3 audio compression was developed by the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany in 1991. MP3 typically provides higher quality sound than WMA because it uses perceptual audio coding to compress CD-quality sound by a factor of 12. As a result, MP3 has become almost the universal standard among audio usage and broadcasting. It provides CD-quality sound at a reasonable size and compression at high speed streaming. Please note, however, low bitrate, quality MP3 likely suffer....