Audio Codec Quality Shootout

This taste test by Extreme Tech makes me feel a little better about my hard-thought decision a few months ago to encode and store all of my CDs in WMA format instead of MP3. Everything I'd read said WMA (Series 9) was better, but I worried about compatibility issues: a lot of devices support WMA, but nearly everything supports MP3. What if I ever wanted to buy an iPod?

The clincher for me was Windows Media Player's automatic song-organizing and downsampling abilities. It fetches album art in the background and integrates that info into Windows native file system -- unlike Apple's iTunes, win which you have to open an application to get all the relevant info. The downsampling feature means it can shrink files on the fly while transferring them to a portable audio device.

Well as it turns out, the Media Player can do that with MP3s, too. And that made me wonder if I made the right choice going with WMA. Apparently, I did. Now, if only Apple would back down and let the iPod play WMA files.

(I expected a deluge of angry comments from Mac fans on the article, but several posters make some valid criticism of the article's methodology.)