One day, procrastinating from doing schoolwork and about two days after Microsoft had released their new standard for compressing sound, called MS Audio 4, I decided to see just how good (or bad) the codec was and ran these tests, pitting it against MP3 and RealAudio, both of which it was supposed to crush. While I certainly don't think the quality is earthshattering as it does not scale well to provide CD-quality audio and has annoying high-frequency artifacts, it may give RealAudio a run for its money in the low-bitrate market.

As it turned out, the report became pretty popular. Over 30,000 people are estimated to have viewed this report. A second report will be forthcoming, covering MP2, MP3, AAC, AC-3, QDesign, EPAC, RealAudio, MS Audio 4, and VQF. (I decided to reserve CodecReview.com from Internic.)

NOTE: this report is getting pretty old and may not be representative of the current version of Windows Media.

december 4, 2000 - audio samples are back online!

Executive Summary

Introduction

Equipment

DTMF Tone Tests

Sliding Tone Tests

Speech Tests

Music Tests

Updates

Also of Interest