Pocket Music Sound Quality

[hoffm11]

I have changed many of my WMA files to 64 kps and it seems the sound quality has changed quite a bit. There is a slight hissing sound in the music. Is there something that I can do to get rid of that? Any EQ settings that I should use?

[Falstaff]

There is no way to get rid of the hissing, that is what happens when you encode at low rates.

[maikii]

I have encoded WMAs at 64, and they sound fine. What program did you use to encode them?

[maikii]

Looking back at the title of this thread, something not mentioned in your post, could it have to do with playing the WMAs through Pocket Music?

Do they also sound bad if you play them back in WMP?

[famousdavis]

Looking back at the title of this thread, something not mentioned in your post, could it have to do with playing the WMAs through Pocket Music?

Do they also sound bad if you play them back in WMP?

Excellent point!

My thread on the same subject points to a verrry different (bad) experience playing WMA files outside of WMP.

[jeffmd]

hissing is actually something you might get from one of the basic and most frequently changed setting in pocket music...the volume.

The hiss is the amplifier, not the sound file (Hiss is not an artifact generated by compression). You want to use as little volume as possible, so make sure the audio files you compress are being compressed at a high volume. This can easily be achieved through a process called normalzing. Most cd rippers and audio editors will have this.
You can try applying a volume increase filter to the file too if normalise isnt available, but you must avoid going so high that you clip the samples (this sounds like a distortion that wont go away by lowering the volume).