I just today found out about and downloaded the Media Center. It looks and sounds good so far. But I do have one question before I start exploring a little. As a long-time user of Windows Media Player, I have always ripped into .wma files, usually using the "lossless" compression that results in kbps values of about 500 to 900. (And recently, I've been downloading FLAC-16 files and converting them to lossless .wma, as well.) For these first few tracks I've been playing, I notice that the bit rate I see at the top of the display, just above the blue progress indicator, is significantly less than what's listed for the currently playing track. Right now I see "689 kbps" at the top, but "906" in the Bitrate column for the track. Is this as expected, or is there some setting that will get me a higher bitrate for the playback?
I'm running Windows 8.1 on a Microsoft Surface Pro with all the audio files on an external 4 TB drive connected over USB 3.0.
My audio output is traveling through a USB 2.0 cable to an external sound card (Focusrite Scarlett 2i4). I have not yet tried using an ASIO driver for Media Center, so that might improve my playback once I take that step. I had assumed (for all my audio) that all digital-to-analog conversion was taking place in the sound card, which can handle input higher than the 44.1 / 16-bit I've been sending it.
Anyway, let's start with whether the 2 different bit rates indicate that I can make improvements in the settings.
Thanks,
John