Also.. for compressing music.. mp3 or wma? I have created a whole bunch
of 192 bps wma files, and they sound all right, but with some background
noise in my sennheiser headphones. I am not impressed with the level of
background noise, it sounds like a tape recording made without dolby on
normal bias tape. I am not sure if it's the wma compression scheme, or
the sound card at fault.

WMA sucks. Don't know why they even invented it. MP3 is *much* better
in SNR. WMA is notorious for its background quantization noise.