So, Lasher, have you got any references or proof yet? All I see is endless babbling about how you're right and I'm wrong, and theories which are completely unsupported. Nevertheless, I will reply to you, but I request that in your next post you show at least one piece of proof (even a screenshot of your iTunes library showing WMA files in the 'kind' field will do). Otherwise, I fail to see any point in arguing with you further.
>From the start i have said these things have just been my experience.
Really? Really?
I don't actually think there are any other MP3 players out there that have proper Wifi or you can view youtube videos on. Itunes actually supports WMA format.
I have never had any problems with playing WMA in itunes or on my ipod. (Okay, so now you actually admit that WMA in iTunes is only your personal experience. But look at what follows.) They are only ever converted in order to be played on the ipod itself however the files on your computer stay WMA format. This is the case with most of the high end mp3 players that actually use a program to sync. It just makes the device itself more efficient.
>I think your running in circles here. Almost seems like your arguing both sides.
Nope. You don't even understand what I said there, did you? It said the iPod's supported formats. It is saying that the iPod can play song files encoded in those formats. It didn't say that iTunes automatically converts songs from those formats into AAC for the iPod (which I would think it should mention in the technical specifications of the device).
Your argument that iTunes automatically converts songs into AAC for the iPod for efficiency is completely skewed. Do you even have any idea how encoding algorithms work with AAC and MP3? I may not know much either, but one thing I do know: both AAC and MP3 use lossy compression techniques.
http://www.bobulous.org.uk/misc/audioFormats.html
Can't I just convert my MP3 files to another format if necessary?
Yes, you can convert MP3 files into any other format that you can find software for. But because MP3s are created with lossy compression, the information they contain about the music is not a perfect copy of the original. So you would be working from an imperfect source. Even if the format you were converting to allowed better audio quality than MP3, your converted files would not be able to make use of this extra quality, because you would be working from an MP3 file. Conversion and compression can only ever make quality stay the same or get worse; they can never make quality improve.
That means if you convert an MP3 file to an AAC file sampled at an identical bit rates, you will lose quality. Audio experts recommend that if you must convert your songs between lossy formats such as AAC, MP3, WMA, etc., you should at least double the bit rate. Either way, you would lose. Converting the song to another format with the same bit rate will result in crappy sound quality, and doubling the bit rate for acceptable quality will result in your music library taking up twice its original size (in examples where the entire library is made up of MP3s).
Doing some research here, I decided to convert a 4 minute MP3 file, encoded at 128 kbps to a 128 kbps AAC file. Do you want to know how long it took on my dual-core MacBook? 19 seconds. So that means if you want to copy 100 MP3 files to your iPod, it would take 31 minutes, and that's not even counting the time it takes to transfer the file onto the iPod nor is it taking into account slower computers.
Efficiency? Hah!
