What is WMA?
Windows Media Audio
It is also known as standard WMA. Microsoft created this format to compete with MP3. Fast WMA became a standard format for lossy compression.
Microsoft claims that WMA guarantees the same quality as MP3 with medium bitrate, although this statement is not correct. The same quality is achieved with 25% lower bitrate and is applied only with low bitrate. At 128 kbps it is easily compressed by Lame.
WMA Std ranks second among the known formats with loss yielding only to ubiquitous MP3. This merit is mainly due to the aggressive marketing section of Microsoft.
Windows Media Audio Professional
Windows Media Audio Professional (WMA Pro) released to skip limitations in WMA Standard supports multichannel encoding and high resolution (24bit, high sampling rate).
As WMA Pro is incompatible with WMA Std, Microsoft took the opportunity to create a high quality encoder. Meanwhile WMA Std loses to MP3 after a non-formal public test, WMA Pro occupies a high position (next to other high quality formats) when passing the same test.
Windows Media Audio Lossless
It is a mathematically lossless codec of the same Windows Media family. For being the first lossless codec supported by most players, it was accepted favorably after its launch. High compression of WMA can be compared with that of High WavPack and Monkey’s Audio between fast and normal.
AAC
AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) is a computerized digital audio signal format based on a lossy compression algorithm, a process by which some of the audio data is eliminated in order to obtain the highest degree of compression possible, resulting in an output file that sounds as close as possible to the original.
characteristics
The AAC uses a variable bit rate VBR, an encoding method that adapts the number of bits used per second to encode audio data, depending on the complexity of the audio transmission at a given time. ACA is an encoding algorithm Broadband audio that has superior performance than MP3, which produces better quality in small files and requires less system resources to encode and decode. This codec is oriented to broadband uses and is based on the elimination of redundancies from the acoustic signal, as well as compression by means of the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT), very similar to that of the MP3.
Advantage
Superior audio quality for the same bitrate (kbps) your 32kbps Radio will sound like 128kbps in mp3. Stereo sound support from 16 kbps unlike the MP3 that supports it from 40 kbps. Support in Blackberry, Iphone, Smartphone devices. The members of the codec aacPlus aacPlus v1 family is the combination of AAC and SBR, as the high-efficiency standardization profile in MPEG-4 (HE AAC). aacPlus v2 is based on the strong success story of aacPlus v1 and adds value in all fields where higher compression efficiency of stereo signals is mission critical. aacPlus v2 is a true superset of aacPlus v1, aacPlus v1 is from AAC. With the addition of Parametric Stereo in MPEG, aacPlus v2 is the current state of the art of low-speed standard open bit audio codec. Not compatible with MPEG-1. Sampling frequency: 96 KHz, 88.2 KHz, 48 KHz, 44.1 KHz, 24 KHz, 22.05 KHz, 16 KHz. Maximum quality between 320 and 448 kbps (5 channels) and between 128 and 192 (2 channels) Maximum bitrate Supported: From 12 kbps (in HE-AACv2 profile) up to 448 kbps (in AAC-LC profile)
