WINAMP3 used our newssubmit to tell us about an intresting post on the Winamp Forums that clearly calls to all users to not use the WMA or MP3Pro format.
These formats are all lossy compression formats and have all a potential to become big players on the music compression market. But the Winamp developers encourage you to either stick to MP3 (with LAME) or use Ogg Vorbis (New open source lossy compression method).
Why not to use WMA/mp3pro |
Yes, kids, it would cost us to include mp3pro decoder with Winamp. More info here. mp3pro support will be probably never bundled with winamp; if you want to use mp3pro, you have to live with crappy third-party plugins. At least WMA can be used for free (it's based on microsoft's drivers).
It's simple. You encode mp3pro or WMA under Windows, play them using Winamp, everything is fine. But if you decide to switch to another player, you might find that you can't play mp3pro anymore just because the mp3pro developers didn't decide to make a freely-available plugin for it, or creators of that player don't want to pay for licensing (hell, who does ?).
WMA is less problematic here, at least most of windows-based software can handle it these days. But still, there are NO available mp3pro decoders for OS's different than Windows, WMA is currently available only for Windows and Mac. Decoders for other OS's might appear only if owners of these formats decide to make them (or someone pays them for permission, then releases commercial/shareware decoder); you can safely assume that WMA will be never ported to Linux for an example. If you decide to change OS or want to share your musc collection with a friend who doesn't use Windows, these formats might become totally useless
Read the entire thread on the Winamp Forums here. Be sure to have read it, it's crucial information when you are into MP3. Also pass it along to your friends so it gets known by the masses !
Source: Winamp forums
