Sorry for replying to my own post and posting something OT but I just noticed that this has already been discussed. Just goes to show how reading the other posts first, regardless of how many they are, help in preventing redudancy:)
Continually compression until you reach 1 byte doesn't work. Correct me if I'm wrong but the effectiveness of file compression reduces after each compression (the exact percentage I don't know). To illustrate my point this is what might happen assuming a file with a size of 1000 whatever using the 10:1 compression ratio:
Uncompressed: 1000
1st Compression: 100
2nd Compression: 25
3rd Compression: 20
4th Compression: 19
and so on until you get no benefit from the compression. So even with such an incredible compression ratio of 10:1 it would still be less effective after each time you compress the file hence a filesize of 1 byte should technically be impossible. Of course you could just compress a a really small file but i'm sure the comrpessed file would have some kind of needed overhead thus actually increasing the size of the file (try zipping a 1 byte file and you'll notice the size increase).
Doesn't compression work on a bell curve meaning that the further you compress something the less effective the compression works? To illustrate my case instead of:
Assuming 10:1 compression
1000 (A) --> 100 (B) --> 10(C) --> 1(D)
As those people who ripped to wma find out, its harder to get a good player for that format, even if it uses half the space.
I'm not familiar with other digital music players but I currently own a Rio 600, which to my surprise (when I purchased it) does support the wma format. Although the Rio 600 only comes with 32 megs at first, using the wma format allows me a full hour of music, whereas the mp3 format would only give me half an hour of music with IMHO only slightly better sound quality. (Of course I could upgrade the amount of space in my player but I don't find it necessary to do so.)
However, I don't use wma very often and on the rare occassion that I do use the format is when I want to change the music on my player, which is something I don't do that often. However, when the occasion arises I don't mind wasting a little bit of time to convert the music I want and upload to the player.
If a player as old as mine supports wma then I wouldn't be surprised if many of the newer players do as well thus it shouldn't be difficult to find a player that supports wma, especially some among the higher end players.
Disclaimer: I'm not trying to push WMA on others but WMA can be handy, which in my situation I'm more than happy to use it to get the most play time out of my player.
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Sorry for replying to my own post and posting something OT but I just noticed that this has already been discussed. Just goes to show how reading the other posts first, regardless of how many they are, help in preventing redudancy :)
Continually compression until you reach 1 byte doesn't work. Correct me if I'm wrong but the effectiveness of file compression reduces after each compression (the exact percentage I don't know). To illustrate my point this is what might happen assuming a file with a size of 1000 whatever using the 10:1 compression ratio:
Uncompressed: 1000
1st Compression: 100
2nd Compression: 25
3rd Compression: 20
4th Compression: 19
and so on until you get no benefit from the compression. So even with such an incredible compression ratio of 10:1 it would still be less effective after each time you compress the file hence a filesize of 1 byte should technically be impossible. Of course you could just compress a a really small file but i'm sure the comrpessed file would have some kind of needed overhead thus actually increasing the size of the file (try zipping a 1 byte file and you'll notice the size increase).
Doesn't compression work on a bell curve meaning that the further you compress something the less effective the compression works? To illustrate my case instead of: Assuming 10:1 compression 1000 (A) --> 100 (B) --> 10(C) --> 1(D)
I'm not familiar with other digital music players but I currently own a Rio 600, which to my surprise (when I purchased it) does support the wma format. Although the Rio 600 only comes with 32 megs at first, using the wma format allows me a full hour of music, whereas the mp3 format would only give me half an hour of music with IMHO only slightly better sound quality. (Of course I could upgrade the amount of space in my player but I don't find it necessary to do so.)
However, I don't use wma very often and on the rare occassion that I do use the format is when I want to change the music on my player, which is something I don't do that often. However, when the occasion arises I don't mind wasting a little bit of time to convert the music I want and upload to the player.
If a player as old as mine supports wma then I wouldn't be surprised if many of the newer players do as well thus it shouldn't be difficult to find a player that supports wma, especially some among the higher end players.
Disclaimer: I'm not trying to push WMA on others but WMA can be handy, which in my situation I'm more than happy to use it to get the most play time out of my player.