Cool :) Now, to get one for my 83+ :)

ld 83+se.mem, hl
ld 89.mem, a
cp a
goto makeport

What? What programming language is that?

Looks like some strange cross between assembly and basic.

What's up with all this weird link stuff for calculators?! (PS/2 Keyboard, Winamp controller)

The only thing this program is useful for is Sucking your batterys alive. Are there really people so lazy that they just can't use their mouse?

They never said it was useful. He's just showing how good of a programmer he is.

Suck my assembly Z80 Cors i mix ti-basic and turbandin z80 assembly for greater justise

All your bajs are piss to us

All your bajs? What in the name of God is a bajs?? GET IT OFF!!! GET IT OFFF!!! AAAGH!

BAJS is the most natural form of fertilizer...

good code!

if you can't tell, I'm slowly going mad.

Z80 Assembly.

some freaky mutation of z80, you mean... "goto makeport"? "ld 83+se.mem, hl"? riiiight...

Apparently, someone's begging for a port...
but in a programming language this time...

Not with macro assembler

It would work using macros for the 68k, but I don't think that's valid for z80. Mainly because he switched the order of the operands. Also, what good does "cp a" do? Is that not "ld a,0" or "sub a" or "xor a"? Oh well, enough nit-picking... The post makes sense regarless of the programming.

-Sean

Be vigilant agent 1!

could someone port it to ti83? tnx

The source code and information on how to make it work in other calcs is included in the ti_winamp.zip file. I don't know how to program any other calcs, but I did everything so it can be ported to them.

This is awesome!!! I've been thinking of making an old computer into an mp3 player for my car. All I needed was someway to control it. It was going to be hard getting a LCD to work and expensive. Now I can just use my calculator. I'm so excited now!!!!

...
Why not spend $70 and buy a good MP3 CD player? That's what I did... and it can recognized up to 200 songs per CD.

By the way, on that topic:

Portable MP3 player, uses CompactFlash cards: $90
48MB CompactFlash card: $39 (at Wal-mart)

MP3 CD player, uses any CD/CD-R/CD-RW: $70
700MB 12x CD-R: $1
700MB 4x CD-RW: $1

which one makes more sense?

I ran these numbers are from about a year ago, but considering some of the quality issues I've had/heard regarding MP3CD and MP3 players, they might still be accurate. However, the comparison did not include MP3 CD because of its size (it couldn't fit inside a standard pocket) - www.t-station.net/pic/md_hipzip.gif
Basically the gist is, for the player/recorder and 20 CD's worth of storage, the prices are as follows:
$359 - Minidisc
$659 - Pocketzip
$4,199 - Smartmedia
$3,749 - Compact Flash
$3,999 - Memory stick

Wow. Those numbers are REALLY off for today. On PriceWatch (a technology price monitoring site):

20 Recordable Audio CDs: $20
Sony MiniDisc (9 5-packs): 45 discs = $89.91
PocketZip (actually, only 44 cards... they come in packs of 2, 4, or 10) = $459.70
Mr. Flash 32MB Smart Media: 45 cards = $617.41
Lexar Media 32MB 4x CompactFlash: 45 cards = $897.75
Sandisk 32MB Memory Stick: 45 cards = $1,472.00

Notice that the image you linked to said that the average audio CD length was 72 minutes. Now it's about 80, so you have to realize that this means an additional 2 CDs - or 1,400 MB more. That would be the equivalent of more than 2 more minidiscs, and ... lemme see... 3.56 of everything else. Not cheap.

GO WITH THE MP3 CD PLAYER! It is well worth the investment, since it practically pays for itself. The one I got was a Memorex MPD8505CP. It's awesome. It hardly ever skips (45 seconds of ESP is nice, especially since it only has to read the CD once every 2 minutes or so for an MP3 CD)

To see it, go here (but remove the spaces from the link first)

http://www.memcorpinc.com/ EN/pops/ products_pop_windows/mpd8505.htm

All your MP3 CD post are belong to us.

Note: I just realized that it would only cost about $5 or $6 with minidisc, since they are as long as a CD.

flash mp3 players have better sound quality than cd mp3 players. i see this every time i listen to my flash mp3 and my friends Rio cd mp3. btw, it's the first time ticalc.org posted a news article with a picture!

>>btw, it's the first time ticalc.org posted a news article with a picture!

Not by a long shot.

I repeat: The sound quality depends on many things:
1. The recording quality
2. The encoding quality
3. You stereo's quality.

Until someone comes out with a proper scientific experiment, goes through it, and gives me results showing me I'm wrong, I still think it's better to use an MP3 CD player.

Besides... THE COST as I said before is ridiculously high for CF cards. At most they spend $10 making each one... the difference in cost for storage space is pretty much negligable. Besides, costs vary greatly. I remember buying a 48MB card for $70 at Target, then going to Radio Shack and hearing that a 32MB card cost $600. Of course, that's because the people at RadioShack are usually learning impaired (a PC word for "f***ing retards").

Uh oh, now I'm going to offend someone... bah.

why not get the ipod, nomad jukebox, or archos jukebox? they each hold(the older models) over 5gigs of memory. the nomad and archos can be found under 200 dollars. much cheaper than crappy removable memory. also no cd to lose. get the ipod once itz price drops, a program is being developed so it can run with windows. it has 10 hr battery life and a size comparable to some old flash mp3 players. the 5 gigs holds several thousand minutes of music (more than a several mp3 cds). it also wont skip like a mp3 cd player has the possibility to.

Good point. Also, there's a new 20GB version for under $400, and it can double as a portable hard drive.

Well, iPod is pricey and only allowes you to download songs into its memory but due to copyright crap upload is disabled so, you can't use it store your music. Nomad Jukebox is good and with decent sound quality but battery life is extremely short and you can't replace it anytime you want because it's a rechargable preinstalled battery. Archos Jukebox is not pricey but is bulky and heavy to carry around not to say sound quality and available options are kinda lacking. So, what's a good thing to get then? (Remains unanswered...)

if u really want a good quality and high capacity mp3 jukebox/harddrive, wait about a year from now. the second generation jukeboxes will be out and will be much better. they will all use lithium ion batteries(therefore, more power and much more battery life), they will all have firewire connections so you wont have to wait forever to load files onto the unit, the hardrives they use will be cheaper and larger so you will get more storage space for your buck and also it makes the units smaller(the biggest plus for a mp3 jukebox). right now if i were in the market for a cheap (therefore not ipod) mp3 jukebox, then i would get the nomad jukebox, it has dsp unlike the other jukeboxes which greatly enhances sound quality, it comes with 2 sets of batteries so it has 8 hrs. of life away from an outlet, but it is the best if you must have a high capacity player now.

good point, but some ppl just plain want one. but since release of iPod (only the hardware size!), there's good stuff to hope for
speaking about Nomad Jukebox, i agree that sound quality and price are good but the batter never lasts for promised 8 hours it lasts for 3 at max!

what are the prices relative to how much each thing can store?

Portable MP3 player, uses CompactFlash cards: $90
48MB CompactFlash card: $39
Talking on ticalc.org: pricless
There are some things money can't buy. for everything else, there's mastercard.

Sorry, I'm bored.

<flamability warning> or masturbation </flamability warning>

I turned a $15 throwaway comp (p1, 100) into an mp3 player for my car. It curretnly has over 3000 songs on it, and still has a good 500 megs left free. If i get the monitor out of the trunk, i can play Carmageddon on it too, which is just plain cool. The only downside is that i have to boot it every time i start my car, but you'd be amazed how fast a windows95 system can boot if you strip it down enough.

Well, this was my first post to the site in over a year. See you in 2002!

try putting a stripped linux on it and be amazed...plays mp3's great...boots up on a 486-DX4 100MHz in about 7 seconds. then, with a LCD connected to the parallel port like the one at the link it works great. add a ti calc for conveinence and you got one of them nice things that really has no point :-P

that's what i will do, i already have a numpad driver but no LCD display yet, so it's kinda hard to browse but still cool

no WinAmp for Linux...well it didn't emulate very well for me. Unless, of course, you'd find an XMMS plugin.

XMMS is cool...

XMMS and WinAmp are very nearly identical... I think. At least, in appearance... and I know some XMMS plugins work in WinAmp and vice versa. Oh well. I dunno.

That's wrong. XMMS was designed to look and feel like Winamp. It uses Winamp skins, so it looks like Winamp. Other than that, the two are not related. XMMS cannot use Winamp plugins, and Winamp cannot use XMMS plugins. The XMMS plugin architecture is much, much nicer than Winamps. It has a nice API that you can use in programs to interface with it. Writing plugins for Winamp involves nasty Win32 hacks, like looking through window titles to find the text on the playlist.

It is very easy to work with XMMS. There is this nice plugin for Winamp called InstantDisc that I have used for several years. It adds global hotkeys, and takes a directory of directories that contain MP3's of CD's, and gives you a list of them, as CD titles, based on the directory name. It also adds hotkeys to skip through albums, and pick a random album. I wanted this feature for XMMS. So I wrote a small C program, xdisc, that links to the XMMS library. You pass it the name of a directory, and it tells XMMS to play it, or pass it a base directory, and it picks a random directory and has XMMS play it. For hotkeys, I use the facilities built into the window manager. On Blackbox, I use bbkeys, and on KDE, I add hotkeys to menu items (thanks to Justin Karneges for pointing out the latter to me).

If absolutely necessary, use VMWare, click on website above for a review,.and install windows on the virtual machine. I'm assuming that you aren't quite this desperate, but you may need windows for other things. I personally only emulate it to compile windows version of my software, and use visual studio, but if you have a pentium 4 with several hundred megs of ram this may be a viable option.

The problem is, that's not a real car system. You can get a portable player that plays MP3 CD's, and connect it through a cassette deck, but that pretty much sucks. The quality won't be that great, and you have to deal with it being a mess of wires. My car's dash panel has a nice way to use a portable CD player, but it's still not nearly as good as a built in one. I am much happier with an in-dash CD player. I want it to look good, in addition to being functional.

Unfortunately, a nice car MP3 system will cost you a lot of cash. The nicest one I've seen that I would consider buying is the Rio Car (see URL as my web page). Unfortunately, it is high priced, but the cost seems pretty justified, and there's no way I could build anything comparable for cheaper, assuming I had the skills and free time.

You need something that will output some decent wattage (45+ per channel), so you don't have to have a separate amp.

You need to store the MP3's. Almost all of my MP3's are ones that I made myself from CD's that I own. I want CD quality sound, so I encode at VBR with 128-256 kbits. Assuming it rips correctly, I can't tell the difference on the sound equipment that I use. Though, I'm no audiophile. I read some tests that indicate that 256 is the highest needed to have CD quality, so it makes sense to use VBR and limit it to that. It averages out to about 192 kbit, but the quality is better (though not sure that I can tell the difference). I'm not one of those people that has hundreds of gigs of MP3's, I've got maybe 10 gigs. So 20-30 gigs of space would be plenty. CD's just won't cut it. If I have to change CD's, then I'll just stick with keeping my CD binder in my car. Solid state RAM is still too expensive to be viable, so a hard drive is obviously the way to go. If it's in the car, it's going to take some shocks, so you need something built for that. Hence, a laptop hard drive. This is what the Rio Car uses. These aren't that expensive, but they're certainly not cheap either, and much more expensive than an equivalent IDE drive.

You need a way to transfer MP3's to the system. USB, ethernet or FireWire would be the way to go.

You need a nice looking display, with a good set of controls. The Rio Car really looks good. A lot better than most car stereo's I've looked at.

You need software to run it. Writing software takes time.

Sorry, but you're not going to get a nice car MP3 system for anywhere near that cheap. But, I do agree entirely, that a calculator is definitely not the way to go. I can't think of anything more tacky, or nerdy. I'd much rather spend my time working on projects that pay, and buy a nice system that other people spent a lot of money developing.

....... I once ate a hot-dog

general sense of *whuh...?*

192kbps a higher bitrate than what is on an Audio CD. 256kbps is just a waste of space if you're not doing VBR. I just use 192.

Just my 2 cents...

Sorry, but that's incorrect. A CD has a much higher bitrate, but you can't directly compare it. If 192 was higher than a CD, than the MP3 would be larger than the original audio from the CD.

Remember, it's kbits, not kbytes. To get bytes, divide by 8. 192kbits is 24kbytes / second. A CD is ~172.27 kbytes / second. A CD is encoded at 44.1 khz. That's one byte per sample, so 44100 bytes per second. CD's are also 16-bit, not 8-bit, so that's 88200 bytes. Then it is in stereo, meaning two channels, so double the size, giving 176400 bytes / second.

I agree that 256 is a waste if you're not doing VBR. Really, I don't see any reason why you wouldn't use VBR. LAME does a good job, and is probably the best encoder around. If part of a song only needs 128 to be perfect, then it will use 128. If it needs 256 to be perfect, then it uses 256.

From my experience encoding my own CD's, you end up with a size smaller than 192, but with (theoretically) better quality (perfect). Looking at one of my albums, Disturbed, the lowest average for a track is 155, and the highest is 167, with the average being around 160. The first Limp Bizkit CD is around 170. Somewhere in this range seems to be about average for my CD's.

Ok, I see what you're saying. I've never bothered to do VBR when ripping/encoding CDs. I don't know why...I always thought 172 for the CDs meant 172 kBITs/sec. Now it all makes sense...:)

I like LAME too.

<off topic>Down with the Sickness!...the ending of that song is strange</off topic>

don't forget that waves that are stored on audio cd's are not compressed like mp3's! even though these waves have a bitrate of 1400 kbps, most audio hardware don't take advantage of it, so it doesn't really matter whether you're plaing an audio cd or 192-256 bps mp3.

Yeah, that's kinda what I was trying to say...

Besides, your ear hears about 1/10 of all the sound that is actually recorded. So a lot of it is a waste. That's how MP3s work - they are compressed through the "magical science of psychoacoustics". Basically, they filter out everything *above* the average human hearing range, and everything *below* it, and also anything on the subliminal level. There's more to it than that, but that's all I can think of at the moment.

ignore the "magical" comment... that was stupid.

I've discovered you can actually have fun researching this kind of thing.

It's not really about is above and below the range of your hearing. It's more removing what you could hear but you don't hear. For example, if there is a loud sound on top of a quiet sound, then you don't need the quiet sound, because the loud sound masks it. They are both in your hearing range, but you can't hear one of them. It has to do with wave theory. Certain frequencies cancel out other frequencies. This is related to "white noise". You can play an opposite sound on top of a sound, and you won't be able to hear it. They both exist at the same volume level, but you can't hear either of them. An example of where this is used is near airports where there are houses close by. They play white noise to mask the sounds of the planes. There are a lot of sites that explain this in more detail, but that's the basic idea.

It's different than that. The mpeg 1-layer 3 codec compresses it by selectively removing data outside of the hearing spectrum and by changeing the audio data from an unsigned value to a signed value+the new base. They can't be compared by bitrates, because one kilobyte of mp3 audio is equal to ten kilobyte of cd audio. It's like comparing cocacola and espresso; they taste just as good, but espresso contains more caffiene goodness.

The quality of an MP3 CD player is awesome, if you encode the files at 128 kbps. That's pretty much equal to normal CD quality. Of course, it does depend on your amp and your speakers, too. But all in all, the human ear cannot physically detect the difference between a normal CD and a 128 kbps MP3 CD.

I would have to disagree. I can easily tell the difference between an MP3 at 128 and 192 on my good computer speakers, and on MP3's burned as audio CD's in my car. Blind listening tests have shown 256 to be the magic threshhold, on much better equipment than mine. It also depends what encoder you're using. LAME has been proven to be better than most (or all?) other encoders at high bitrates (above 128).

yeah, i use LAME for all of my cd rips. it's the best one and it even produces decent quality 128 kbit mp3's!

Many people *claim* they can tell the difference, but it has been scientifically proven that only .005% of the population (that's 1/20k) can actually do it. So unless you have *really* good ears, I doubt you'll tell the difference.

Sure, people will say that they can see a difference. They've been told that MP3s are compressed, and they think the only way you can compress it is by removing quality. As I said in a previous post, MP3 compression filters out sounds the human ear generally cannot hear at all (psychoacoustics, click the link). You'll notice on the page I linked to that MP3 (MPEG) compression is *not* listed as a lossy compression method. Meaning there is virtually (if not literally) no detectable loss of quality.

Sorry, but I have to disagree with you. I can very easily tell the difference between a 128kps MP3 and a CD/MD on my home stereo. Granted, I have a pretty nice setup, but any MP3 under 192kps sounds very "muffled" on my stereo. Treble can become "choppy" as well. You can clearly hear this within any song containing a high use of symbols. Because I use MD as my main medium of music, MP3's tend to sound pretty bad on my stereo, regardless if I recorded it to MD or playing it from my computer. Sure, MD's are using a form of compression similar to MP3's (ATRAC), but it is FAR superior to MPEG compression. I honestly cannot tell the difference between my MD's and my CD's. I'd have to say that MPEG compression below 320kps (around what an MD does) is very lossy.

You say the treble sounds "choppy." Try adjusting the equalizer, if you can. Usually, "muffled" sound is due to a poorly-set-up stereo. An MP3 should be able to sound just as good as an audio CD song.

"You say the treble sounds "choppy." Try adjusting the equalizer, if you can. Usually, "muffled" sound is due to a poorly-set-up stereo"

I shouldn't have to adjust my equalizer at all when listening to MP3's. I get perfect sound (and smooth treble) from CD's and MD's. I shouldn't have to adjust my equalizer to "fix" the problem of sound loss on MP3's. And, even when I do adjust my equalizer, the problem does not go away. Try playing a 128kps MP3 of Linkin Park's "Crawling" on a high quality stereo and compare it to the orginal CD. I'd bet $$$ you'll hear the difference.

Your stereo just isn't a good one. Since you've mentioned it plays ATRAC file format, then it's Sony MD and it isn't good either and very overpriced. If you didn't know, ATRAC is a Sony's rip-off of MP3 which was made to copy protect the copyrighted media. It's the worst idea Sony came up with, if you want to put MP3's onto your MD it'll convert then to the ATRAC which just wastes your HD space and your time. BTW, that Sony MD has one of the worst SN ratio of the similar products manufactured by other companies.

First off, where the hell do you get your information from?

ATRAC was out well before MP3's even remotely became popular. ATRAC is not Sony's rip-off of MPEG compression technology. ATRAC was introduced way back in 1990. However, at this time, the Minidisc failed and was re-introduced to the recording market in 1993 and has been strong ever since. And as for SN ratio, you are, once again, completely wrong. Sony's MD can get an SN ratios at and past 100+db, which is as good, if not better then, most CD's.

even if it was, Sony program still converts your MP3's into ATRAC which worsens the already worsened quality even more!

oh, and speaking of SN ratio, i've NEVER seen any Sony player going over 100. pls show me a model which does

I tried it. And no, there was absolutely no difference. None of the 8 other people listening thought so, either. So I think you're being a *tad* overprotective of your system...

Finally, someone said it!

Oops... you said that already.

>Sorry, but you're not going to get a nice car MP3 system for anywhere near that cheap.
I disagree. I think it's kind of pointless in the long run to get angry about having to switch CDs. If you want a functional MP3 system, then *all* you need is an MP3 CD player, a tape adapter, an AC adapter, and a car with a tape deck. Like I said before, compressed at the proper level, you can't tell that it's not a normal CD. Plus, you can fit 700MB (usually about 180-200 songs) on a CD. If you can't manage to fit all the songs you actually *listen* to on one CD, you need to either
1. clean out your music collection a bit, or
2. stop convincing yourself that you listen to all 7000 songs.
I had about 11,000, at one point. Then I burned them all onto CDs, and I carry them around in a case slightly smaller (even when full) than my hard drive.

Not true! There is a lot more to a stereo than anyone is considering. DSPs internal AMP equilizers, filters, the list goes on and on. David is right a REAL deck is the only way to go. THey are expensive but there is at least one compnay out there that will change this real quick. Old MP3 players (handheld)had at a minimum 5 IC's on them. Now all of this is done on one small 100 pin TQFP IC. This means that it is much cheaper to build. Boards are less complex. I also think that if you want a good system in your car you most defianately need an external amplifier. You can amplify the signal digitally to a certain extent but SNR (signal to noise raio) gets bad on the analog end. Then you have Total Harmonic Distortion to worry about. Using a cassete deck is not very good. The wire used in those things is crappy. For a good system at least an 8 guage wire is usually used sometimes even 6 and lower. I presonally have two amps in my car. One for subs and the other for speakers. If you want quality you better go with a REAL deck.

Cullen is right.... Even the idea of a TI-Hub i heard is ridiculous... because if you can't open one up and look at it then you'll never know how conplicated ti really is. As for Winamp, it is a great program and it performs very well, bu tit has software emulation for a hardware setup of a dedicated system, and anyone know software emulation cannot beat good hardware profiels of a dedicated system such as a radio!

And I disagree with you.

If I have to switch CD's, then why do I want MP3's in the first place? I buy music that I like. The reason I have all my CD's encoded, is so that when I am working at the computer, I don't have to manually switch CD's. I can keep my CD binder in the car. If I have to switch CD's, and have a binder full of MP3 CD's, then why bother? I'd much rather play the originals. Besides, they look cooler, too.

A tape adapter is going to have poor quality. If you want any chance of decent sound, you will need an amp that has a direct input. The poor quality of the connection, combined with the likely already poor quality MP3's, is going to sound bad.

I have a good in dash CD player for my car, and the factory speakers are quite decent. I have had friends who would play an audio CD created from low quality MP3's (128kbit), and it was very easy to tell the difference between them and the original CD.

Your point about music collection size makes no sense, and you even contradicty yourself. I've only been buying CD's for the past few years, so I have maybe 100 CD's. I could easily double that right now with artists that I like, if I wanted to spend the money on that. You're not always in the mood to listen to the same thing. I like being able to stick in a CD and listen to the entire thing all the way through, as the artists intended. If I wanted to hear the same songs over and over, I'd listen to the radio.

>>>A tape adapter is going to have poor quality. If you want any chance of decent sound, you will need an amp that has a direct input. The poor quality of the connection, combined with the likely already poor quality MP3's, is going to sound bad.<<<

I agree. The music is only going to sound as good as a cassette tape if you're going to do it that way.

umm... I've said this in another post, but there's almost no discernible quality difference between and audio CD song and a 128kbps MP3 song. Besides, if your MP3 CD player has a digital-out tape adapter (which mine does), the sound quality isn't degraded through the transferrance. Let's just put this debate to rest by saying that MP3s are good, but if you want perfection you need audio CDs.

And your other post was wrong. Many people can easily hear the difference between 128 and 192 mp3's on any mid range speakers. There is a definite noticable quality loss. The music is there, but it loses the full range.

Do you not realize what psychoacoustics *is*? You CANNOT tell the difference because the sound has been recreated so that INAUDIBLE parts of it were removed. There IS no difference discernible to ANY human ear. You might *think* there is, but you would be wrong.

Besides, I wasn't talking about different encoding rates. I was talking about the difference between audio CDs and MP3s. I know that the quality changes between encoding rates. I also know that, usually, encoding at anything over 128kbps ends up packing more information in the MP3 file than needs to be there, and above 256kbps, everything is literally the same - the data is repeated to fill in the extra 'quality'.

Yes, I know what it is, but apparently you don't. At 128kbps there simply isn't enough data space to encode the necessary sound information to have an accurate reproduction of most music. At 192kbps, there is, for the most part. It is simple to prove this. Use LAME and encode a song using VBR4 or better, with a minimum of 128kbps and a maximum of at least 256kbps. Play it in Winamp, and watch the bitrate change. For some parts, it will be at 128kbps. And for some parts, it will be at 256kbps. That means that anything less than 256kbps is losing data.

The the URL (Web Page) above for blind listening tests done on very high quality professional sound equipment. 128kbps is not CD quality, 256kbps is.

Sorry, I was wrong before. If you want perfect quality with LAME, use "--r3mix", described on www.r3mix.net.

Use Microsofts WMA Format. They claim you can get cd quality at 64kbps so that saves a lot of space.
64=128
128=160
160=192
the highest it goes up to is 192

Micro$oft's WMA format is one of the most crappy music formats I have ever heard. I can tell the difference between an MP3 encoded at 128kbps, and a WMA sound file encoded at 160. MP3 sounds way better. On my computer's sound card (nothing special) it sounds much "hollower" than MP3.

you just hate MS. i agree that 64 kbps WMA is not equal 128 kbps MP3, but 128 kbps WMA is definitely better than 128 kbps MP3. i just stick to MP3's cuz they're more popular.

I don't "hate" Micro$oft. I'm just saying that WMA sucks, and while we're on the subject, some of MS's other products suck too. (When I used Windoze, I did like IE 6.0 though...) MS has, however, done a very good job putting an Operating System on the market that many people use. I'll give them credit for that. It's not very good but anyway...

>>>128 kbps WMA is definitely better than 128 kbps MP3<<<

No it's not. WMA sounds awful. On my stereo it has less bass to it than an MP3, and it sounds _really_ hollow. Try ripping a song off a CD to wave, and encoding it to both WMA and MP3 at 128. The MP3 sounds much fuller than the WMA.

WMA compression is both lossy and ridiculous. Microsoft came out with it as their "answer" to MP3's popularity. It sucks donkey balls.

Thank you...

anytime. It's good to get a good ranting bitch out every now and then.

Most WMA audio sounds like it's coming from a submerged speaker... as in, submerged in a bathtub or whirlpool. It's garbled and ... well, just plain BAD. It's worse than RealAudio ... wait, no that's impossible.

How to write a RealAudio compression program:
1. Whack yourself in the head until you are deaf. This step is very important.
2. Dip your head in boiling water so as to scour out any remnants of your eardrums.
3. Program some little crappy thing in Tcl that randomly generates sound frequencies according to the pixels in a GIF image.
4. Sell it for $20 per license.
5. Become rich.
6. Buy a small country.
7. Be assassinated.

Have fun. Remember, you have to be deaf before any of the other steps make any sense.

lol

Microsoft's audio format - generally good, high compression rates result in smaller file sizes than Mp3, Microsoft claim WMA is twice as good as Mp3, so if an Mp3 file had a bit rate of 128 kbps, 64 kbps can be used (for best quality results encode directly from an Audio CD, not an already compressed Mp3 file).

Scale: Microsoft claims WMA8 gives CD quality at 64 kbps, hmmmm, perhaps only if your CD player is acting funny....for me I think 160 Kbps gives an acceptable quality.

WMA v8 Additions (from v7)

MUCH better encoding at lower bit rates,
Snazzy new look,
Crossfade compatible in dBpowerAMP Audio Player
Scripting can now convert without displaying options page.

WMAs suck. There is no argument. They're absolutely horrible quality. WMV video is even worse

Isn't WMV video is a streaming format similar to the streaming video format made by Real?

Yes. Read my post a few branches up. Then all shall be revealed.

that is THE funniest thing ive ever heard

Notice they *CLAIM*, not *they have PROVEN*.

Click on webpage above to see the linux tutorial on setting up an mp3 computer. It focuses on makeing a network booting system to be placed in a stereo rack, but it also has some good information about adding a remote control, and setting up a system without a monitor. I don't turn sixteen for 6 more months, but I will be doing something similar. The only hard part will be the 5 volts needed for the computer's hard disk, and the power for the dumbterminal(maintenance.