910 and WMA

tonygamble · Regular Visitor Joined: Jan 23, 2007 Posts: 186

I'm building up a library of WMA music files downloaded from Napster.

Can I safely assume that they will play on my 910 when I get the long awaited FM transmitter?

Tony

andydigital44 · Regular Visitor Joined: Mar 29, 2005 Posts: 193

The 910 doesn't support WMA as far as i know, the ones i had certainly didn't show up in the list of songs, so i converted all my WMA's to MP3's, which is a shame because WMA sounds better than MP3's when you compare them at the same bit rate.

Tim Buxton · Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 3:01 pm Post subject:

How do you mean? The FM transmitter allows you to play music files stored on your 910 over the radio speakers. I think that only the mp3 format is supported.
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Tim

tonygamble · Regular Visitor Joined: Jan 23, 2007 Posts: 186

Tim,

I mentioned FM in passing to explain that I wanted my 910 to play my music.

I spent an hour googling before I posted my question and came up with several references to the 910 handling both MP3 and WMA. But that is not to say they were true.

And hence my post to here - the fountain of all TT knowledge.

Tony

andydigital44 · Regular Visitor Joined: Mar 29, 2005 Posts: 193

I've just run another test with some WMA's and they definitely don't work. I even tried creating a wma folder in the route of the drive and putting songs in it, but the player still doesn't see it them.

tonygamble · Regular Visitor Joined: Jan 23, 2007 Posts: 186

Thanks Andy,

So I'd need to convert them to MP3 if I wanted to load them.

Tony

andydigital44 · Regular Visitor Joined: Mar 29, 2005 Posts: 193

Unfortunately mate yes you do. When you convert them go up one level in bit ratio to keep the quality, i.e. 128 bit wma to 160 bit mp3

tonygamble · Regular Visitor Joined: Jan 23, 2007 Posts: 186

Andy,

I really don't want a duplicate set of every music track in WMA and MP3 format on my laptop if I can avoid it.

Do you happen to know if I can do the conversion on the fly as I transfer the library to the 910 ?

Tony

andydigital44 · Regular Visitor Joined: Mar 29, 2005 Posts: 193

tonygamble · Regular Visitor Joined: Jan 23, 2007 Posts: 186

Thanks Andy,

I'll look around.

MP3 files are about twice as large as WMA? Yes?

Tony

andydigital44 · Regular Visitor Joined: Mar 29, 2005 Posts: 193

Not really. To get the same audio quality from MP3 as an WMA you have to go up to the next standard bit rate which makes the files about 30% bigger approximately.

Example: to get a MP3 sounding as good as a 128bit WMA you would have to encode the MP3 at 160bit.

tonygamble · Regular Visitor Joined: Jan 23, 2007 Posts: 186

Thanks,

I'll come back when I've looked at conversion software.

Tony

tonygamble · Regular Visitor Joined: Jan 23, 2007 Posts: 186

I'm back!

Snag is that the WMA to MP3 software, certainly not that DBpower one mentioned above, does not work with Napster to Go files.

So it's off to the shops to buy another device for my music, tomorrow.

Rather a waste of that big hard disk on my 910 - but learnt the lesson too late.

Tony

andydigital44 · Regular Visitor Joined: Mar 29, 2005 Posts: 193

Hang on a minute don't go wasting your money just yet. I think the problem you are having is that the WMA files that you have are protected by DRM and I don't personally know of an easy way to strip DRM from WMA files. It's the DRM that is stopping you from converting to MP3.

tonygamble · Regular Visitor Joined: Jan 23, 2007 Posts: 186

Andy,

Yes it will be the DRM.

If you have any suggestions I am certainly willing to have another bash at converting them.

Tony

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