Issue with WMA Lossless in foobar2000, dBpoweramp, and EZ CD Audio Converter

2024-10-17 00:30:45

Hello everyone,

I would like to share an issue I've encountered with audios encoded in Windows Media Audio Lossless and some potential solutions I've discovered.

Description of the Problem

I've noticed that when using foobar2000, dBpoweramp, and EZ CD Audio Converter by Poikosoft to encode audio in the Windows Media Audio Lossless format, the last few samples of audio sometimes get truncated. This problem has been reported by other users, and the developers of these applications have suggested using other audio formats because Microsoft has not resolved this issue.

Investigation and Findings

After some investigation, I discovered that the problem seems to originate from the development environment used for encoding in WMA Lossless. Currently, foobar2000, dBpoweramp, and EZ CD Audio Converter use the Windows Media Format 11 SDK to handle this format. Unfortunately, this SDK has known issues that Microsoft has not fixed.

However, when testing with fre:ac, which uses Media Foundation instead of the Windows Media Format 11 SDK, the issues with the last audio samples being truncated disappeared. Media Foundation is a more recent technology and seems to have resolved these problems that affect the older SDK.

Suggestion

I understand that switching SDKs may not be trivial, but I would like to suggest considering the possibility of updating these applications to use Media Foundation for handling the WMA Lossless format. This could potentially resolve the audio truncation issues currently affecting users.

I deeply appreciate the work that the developers of these applications do and hope that this information is helpful in further improving their products. If more details or additional testing are needed, I would be happy to collaborate.

Thank you for your attention and for the excellent software you provide to the community.

Best regards.

Re: Issue with WMA Lossless in foobar2000, dBpoweramp, and EZ CD Audio Converter

Reply #1 – 2024-10-17 05:00:07

Who needs it WMA? :о

Re: Issue with WMA Lossless in foobar2000, dBpoweramp, and EZ CD Audio Converter

Reply #2 – 2024-10-17 06:46:54

I don't know if you have noticed, but foobar2000 doesn't include any kind of WMA encoder. If you want to encode to WMA, you can use any encoder you have.

I am not aware of encoders having issues, the length glitch is produced by decoders. And Media Foundation decoder is buggy, it will not work correctly on new Windowses.

This is my recommended encoder for use with foobar2000, wonderful simple command line program by lvqcl: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,90519.0.html.

Re: Issue with WMA Lossless in foobar2000, dBpoweramp, and EZ CD Audio Converter

Reply #3 – 2024-10-17 15:12:36

Who needs to use Windows Media Audio Lossless?
Someone who mistakenly encoded their music in this format in the first place and needs to find a way to preserve all the information when converting to a new format.

It is also needed by those who desire perfect integration with Windows Explorer.

Explanation
The problem lies with the Windows Media Format 11 SDK decoder. Therefore, ignore these latest samples as they result in truncated encodings. Fortunately, audio encoded to WMA Lossless with WMAEncode_0.2.9c preserves all the samples; the issue, as I mentioned, is in the decoding. WMAEncode_0.2.9c is not based on Media Foundation.

Comment
As a personal comment, I currently have my entire library in FLAC for playback on Android with Poweramp. I would have appreciated if someone had given me this information several years ago, and surely many others who made the mistake of encoding all their music in the WMA Lossless format would have too.

Re: Issue with WMA Lossless in foobar2000, dBpoweramp, and EZ CD Audio Converter

Reply #4 – 2024-10-17 16:47:35

AFAIK, ffmpeg decoder is considered to be safe to decode WMA lossless.

Re: Issue with WMA Lossless in foobar2000, dBpoweramp, and EZ CD Audio Converter

Reply #5 – 2024-10-17 17:43:53

@gagorial, you need to be clearer about what is encoding and what is decoding.

(Except I think it is ... known here?
Not saying it doesn't deserve to be stated again: Windows mishandles their own formats. Considering the lengths Microsoft usually go to to maintain compatibility, that says something about how obsolete those are. Luckily the situation of lossless formats is that you can convert away from them.)

Re: Issue with WMA Lossless in foobar2000, dBpoweramp, and EZ CD Audio Converter

Reply #6 – 2024-10-17 18:22:39

I completely agree with all of you. Thank you very much for the observations.

I apologize if I overlooked the difference between encoding and decoding as I considered it unnecessary to mention some of the intermediate steps.

I simply presented this information and these findings in case anyone still has a file in this format and wants to know how to avoid this problem.

I fully agree that today it is much more convenient to use other formats that have much greater energy efficiency, much faster encoding or decoding speeds, much higher compression, and that today lossy WMA formats statistically tend to be less preferred compared to other lossy audio formats due to better integration with other players or systems, robustness against packet loss (like Opus), and perceived quality.

With that, I consider this disclosure concluded for me.