WMA to MP3 copnversion?

There is a plugin for Nero to convert WMA tracks to an Audio CD. But this whole lossy to lossy conversion is a very bad practice because your music is already quite compressed and has lost some of its fine detail in the Wave to WMA process and converting this WMA yet again to MP3 smells of catastrohpy to me (in relation to sound quality). Because the mp3 encoder will try its best to compress the already compressed wave file by muting transients, deleting low volume overlapping parts, using a low-pass filter to cut even more of the higher frequencies (read: thin and shallow sound and lack of air), etc. Of course, if it's the only way for you (e.g. you've lost the original CDs) there isn't anything else you can do.

Remember that this is true for all the lossy compression formats out there not just WMA to MP3 and vice versa.

Also, MP3 (encoded at high bitrates with a good encoder, like LAME) sounds much better than WMA at the same bitrate. When you go to 96KBit/s or under that, the situation is reversed: WMA is actually listenable but MP3 becomes utter crap. So unless you really need to carry 1000 WMA tracks at 80kbit/s, I suggest ripping to ~160kbit/s MP3 (for the road, that birate is sufficient). If you're listening with a good system but still need the portability of the mp3 (over lossless formats like APE and FLAC), I suggest >224kbit/s or a high average bitrate VBR (e.g. LAME --preset extreme).

lossy, i'll study that even further.

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