Philips MUSE limited WMA support?

[Alamogordo]

Hi, I am considering the Philips Muse as my next player. However, when reading the small print in the spesification columns, at Philips own website, the WMA range is limited to 5-192 mb/s. Since most of my music is wma 320 mb/s, I have serious doubts. Can anyone confirm this limitation? I can't believe that this is possible in 2009, especially when you consider this players supple audio format support.

Ove

[CrowdAds]

[madkid]

Originally Posted by Alamogordo

Hi, I am considering the Philips Muse as my next player. However, when reading the small print in the spesification columns, at Philips own website, the WMA range is limited to 5-192 mb/s. Since most of my music is wma 320 mb/s, I have serious doubts. Can anyone confirm this limitation? I can't believe that this is possible in 2009, especially when you consider this players supple audio format support.

Ove

If the player you are looking for doesn't work with your current WMA collection you could get a program to convert from WMA to MP3. Doing this you'll lose a bit of sound quality. But the converted copies will only be used when listening to music on the player and in my experience with converting, the sounds quality doesn't seem to suffer much if at all. The program I have in mind is NCH Switch. I used to use it. Now I use foobar2000 but you'll need the LAME command line encoder on hand and it's not exactly easy to find one that isn't just source code.

http://www.nch.com.au/switch/

Remember, do not replace the WMA files with the converts if this is the way you choose to go. Only use the new MP3s on your player.

[Olley]

Are you confuding mb/s with kbps? Any wma files I've got that have 192 as a spec have it in kbps.

[madkid]

Originally Posted by Olley

Are you confuding mb/s with kbps? Any wma files I've got that have 192 as a spec have it in kbps.

That's a good point. If you've got files rated in mb/s then you have some pretty large files. MP3s, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, AAC all use kpbs (kilobytes per second) to rate sound quality.

[Alamogordo]

Originally Posted by madkid

If the player you are looking for doesn't work with your current WMA collection you could get a program to convert from WMA to MP3. Doing this you'll lose a bit of sound quality. But the converted copies will only be used when listening to music on the player and in my experience with converting, the sounds quality doesn't seem to suffer much if at all. The program I have in mind is NCH Switch. I used to use it. Now I use foobar2000 but you'll need the LAME command line encoder on hand and it's not exactly easy to find one that isn't just source code.

http://www.nch.com.au/switch/

Remember, do not replace the WMA files with the converts if this is the way you choose to go. Only use the new MP3s on your player.

Thanks for your kind advise. This is definitely a possibility, but I'm not ready for the hours it will take to convert all my WMA files. Alamogordo

[Alamogordo]

Originally Posted by madkid

That's a good point. If you've got files rated in mb/s then you have some pretty large files. MP3s, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, AAC all use kpbs (kilobytes per second) to rate sound quality.

I stand corrected. I had just spent several days struggling with an ageing computer that slowly died on me. My backup disk died at the same time, but for a completelly different reason. So - I guess the megabyte and kilobyte distinction got lost in the process.

[madkid]

Originally Posted by Alamogordo

I stand corrected. I had just spent several days struggling with an ageing computer that slowly died on me. My backup disk died at the same time, but for a completelly different reason. So - I guess the megabyte and kilobyte distinction got lost in the process.

Yeah, that is understandable. Computers have a nasty tendancy to do that. Got two computers in my bedroom that 'don't work'. I blew out the power supply on one and the other was just old and got replaced. I recently took the Pentium One out of it and I think managed to break it.


As for the time it could take to convert music, save the converted music on the player. Don't replace your entire collection with converted music. That'd just be ridiculous. I kinda wish I hadn't done that when I had my Philips. And only do a small batch at a time that you start before you go to bed. Sometimes things like this work best overnight due to time constraints. Anyway, I hope all works well and that you'll be able to enjoy your player.

[Olley]

As nice as the Muse may be, if it won't play your existing music I'd go looking for another player. Sometime companies under-report what a player can do, just to be safe. You may find it can play your 320kbps songs just fine. In any case, keep the receipt. Check out the store's return policy "just-in-case".

[Alamogordo]

I did contact Philips about it, and they never replied. I guess that's a good indication that the muse actually has this limitation in the WMA department. I have decided to go for a D2+ instead. Thanks!

[Olley]

I did you a favor. I borrowed my neighbor's Muse. He said he wouldn't mind me testing music samples on it so long as I left them on it when I brought it back. I put two WMA files on it. One was 333kbps and the other was 341kbps. Both played fine. BTW, the noise cancelling works pretty well. I'm considering getting one of these for myself. Seems to be well built.

Edit: I also put a couple Lossless WMAs on it with over 1000kbps bitrates, and they would play.... almost. It was as if they were videos dropping some frames. The audio got progressively choppy as it went on. The poor Muse tried though.

[Alamogordo]

Thank you! That's just what I was hoping for, someone actually testing the muse - first hand. I'm not really surprised, can't see any reason why Philips would use a limited wma-support in this model, while the other gogear models have full wma-support. Kinda weird that they don't know the specifications on their own models?
Well, anyway, thanks so much, and a happpy 2010 to you.

[Olley]

My pleasure. Happy 2010 to you as well! Enjoy your Muse. It looks to have great Video support as well. Everything I put on it has played so far.

[madkid]

My GoGear wouldn't play WMAs right either. If I played a song, turned off the player during the song and turned it back on, the progress bar would either go back to the beginning while the song returned to spot I left off at or the progress bar would show the spot where I left at but the music would restart. Kinda sucked. So I converted all my WMAs to MP3. I mainly had MP3 anyway. The WMAs came off of SpiralFrog when they were still up.