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[jphilpit]

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

[JimH]

Welcome to the forum.

The bitrate column shows the average bitrate for the track.  The bitrate at the top is the current (instantaneous) bitrate.

Our CTO, Matt, is one of the world's experts on lossless audio.  He's the author of Monkey's Audio.

The wiki has a few audio topics that you might find interesting.

[jphilpit]

Thanks, Jim,
Thanks for the quick response. Since my first post, I've changed over to the ASIO driver, and it's all still good. But the numbers I reported earlier still hold.

I used to teach calculus, so I know very well the difference between average and instantaneous rates. What you say about the number at the top being the instantaneous rate would make sense if it displayed different numbers at different times throughout the track's playback, sometimes higher, sometimes lower than the average. But, instead, it stays the same, and is always lower than the average value. Perhaps the display is reading the instantaneous value from the start and then never updating the display as playback proceeds.

It's not a problem, as the music sounds good. But if the behavior I'm seeing (a static value over the course of the track) is unexpected, then perhaps this is a bug report.