I stayed home from work to do my taxes but Microsoft had the poor taste to release the final version of Windows Media Audio 8 this morning and so I had to spend a couple of hours playing with it instead of doing my taxes. Life's a bitch.

The short summary is this - it's pretty good! And this time, they backed up their claims with all kinds of cool charts and comparisons. For instance, this page has some cool comparisons and if you go all the way down to the bottom you can download a ".wmd" file that subtracts the encoded version from the original uncompressed .wav file so you can hear what's "left behind" from the encoding. It's cool.

(Note: I had to tell my Windows Media Player to update itself about five times before it recognized what to do with the .wmd file - so if clicking on the .wmd file doesn't launch Windows Media Player tell it to update itself [the menu item to check for updates is under the Help menu]).

And this page compares Windows Media Audio 7 vs. Real Audio 8 with lots of cool charts. Also the page goes into some of the details about how Real Audio drops out stuff they think you won't hear. I especially like the comment that Real Audio is tuned for cheap to mid-range PC speakers (which is really pretty smart but MS seems to have gone beyond that with WMA 8).

After reading all these links and others, and, of course, listening to lots of samples, I have to say ... It's good! At 64 kbps it sounds really good! And it sounds pretty good at 48 kbps!

For more technical white papers from Microsoft, go here.

Having said all that - it's still a misnomer to say that it is "CD quality". It's "near-CD quality". And one thing missing from all of the analysis is what kind of processor is required to decode WMA8. Audio compression has been getting better (i.e., smaller) because there is more CPU horsepower available. My tests show that it takes about 1/2 to 3/4s of a P200 to decode a WMA8 stream. But I wish Microsoft had done that analysis as well.

Finally, Microsoft has released two encoders - one is a Windows app called Audio Converter which is free in a reduced mode that will only convert MP3 files to WMA8. The other is a command line utility that will only convert .wav files to WMA8.

I think the reason Microsoft hasn't released a general codec that would work with just about any program (say, Music Match), is that the process is pretty slow. When I encoded a file to WMA format with Music Match it actually came out as WM-Audio, which is an earlier version (perhaps the beta version). I doubt they can speed up WMA8 much - it does a good job compressing the data by working hard at it. Perhaps they will release it with a switch that allows it to do a slightly inferior job more quickly. The WM-Audio files produced by Music Match sound nearly as good as WMA8. Personally, I don't care how long it takes, because I usually just fire up Music Match and leave the room. And, of course, the steadily increasing power of CPUs will eventually make the encoding time fast without any changes to the way it works.

However it works out, the quality is so good that I would finally be happy encoding an album at 64 kbps and listening to it from a little portable device. 64 megabytes would hold two hours of "near-CD" music- that's cool! Better yet, one of those new CD players that play compressed audio would be even better: 20 hours of "near-CD" music on a single CD!