There's already been a lot of discussion on the merits of firmware version 2.6, but since we like beating dead horses (at least the metaphorical ones), there's still something to be said about the PSP's recent support for Windows Media Audio files.A forum poster over on the PlayStation boards quite enthusiastically noted that he was able to reduce the file size of his MP3 collection by half after converting them to the WMA format via Microsoft's free media encoder. Being the industrious posters we are, we immediately jumped on the Internet and began looking through dozens of pages of comparisons and opinion. Three minutes later we quit and decided to look up Brad Hill from The Digital Music Weblog to get the deal on the difference instead.
After hearing the gist of the forum post, he replied, "That's just about right. 64k WMA sounds roughly the same as 128k MP3." He unfortunately couldn't tell us how the file sizes and quality would compare at higher bitrates, but the point was clear: At acceptable bitrates, WMA is the winner.
[Thanks, Alex]
