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When it comes to subverting popular computing technologies to serve its own stockholders, nobody beats Microsoft. The company did it with graphical user interfaces, it did it with dozens of disk and file utilities, and it did it again with the Web. Now Microsoft wants you to leave the widely accepted MP3 file format behind and come over to the dark side: Windows Media Audio. It would be easy to dismiss WMA as a crappy substitute for the real digital-audio McCoy, but--surprise!--WMA may actually turn out to be better than MP3 for many of us.

MP3 encoders such as Jukka Poikolainen Software's Easy CD-DA Extractor (also available at FileWorld), the MusicMatch Jukebox (also available at FileWorld), and Xing Technology's AudioCatalyst (also available at FileWorld), let you create MP3 files at a variety of bit rates suited to the audio quality of different sources--64 kbps may be plenty for a vintage monophonic jazz reissue, but a modern stereo recording might need 192 kbps or more. Most MP3 encoders can hear the difference between a CD track encoded at 128 kbps and the same track encoded at 160, 192, 224, or 256 kbps. The higher the bit rate, the better the sound--especially at the higher frequencies and when played through first-rate audio equipment. But the higher the bit rate used for encoding, the bigger the resulting file--which means that downloads will take longer, and fewer files will fit on your digital audio player.

According to Microsoft, WMA files sound as good as MP3 clips, at half the bit rate (thus consuming half the disk space). The truth isn't quite so simple. In a test conducted by the National Software Testing Labs (see theFinal MSAudio Report), a majority of listeners thought that a WMA file encoded at 64 kbps sounded more like the original audio CD track than an MP3 file encoded at 128 kbps did. The lab didn't compare the formats at higher bit rates, though.

In a herculean double-blind test, Sound and Vision magazine found that the quality of MP3 and WMA were roughly equivalent when both were encoded at 128 kbps, so it's possible that WMA's advantage exists only at the lower rates. To read the S&V article, browse on over to Sound & Vision Online, enter Windows Media Audio in the search box, press Enter, and choose Download Showdown.

If you currently download or encode a lot of 128-kbps MP3 audio files, switching to 64-kbps WMA could save you a fair number of megabytes and let you cram twice as many tracks into your digital audio player's limited memory. Microsoft's free Windows Media Player 7 lets you encode CDs into WMA format, play back both MP3 and WMA files, and upload either format to your audio player. You can download the 7.2MB player from Microsoft.

Microsoft predicts that most digital audio players being sold this holiday season will play WMA audio. RCA's Lyra plays both MP3 and WMA formats, but most other players are MP3-only, so don't jump on the WMA bandwagon yet if that's how you primarily listen to digital audio. As we went to press, Creative Labs and Diamond promised WMA compatibility upgrades for their respective Nomad II and Rio 500 players.

If you don't use a digital audio player, WMA could still be a good choice. Most leading digital audio playback applications--including Winamp, RealPlayer, and (of course) Windows Media Player--play WMA files. And if all those downloaded files are piling up on your hard disk faster than you can burn CDs, you may want to convert your existing library of MP3s to WMA. A great tool for the conversion is Dennis Rebentrost's $19 Audio Converter 2.05, which is available at FileWorld. You can download a 30-day demo version of the utility from Dennisre.com. You may also need to download the Windows Media Audio component from Dennisre.com and install it.