You can always tell when music is lossless because there are only a few widely used Lossless formats. These are :
.Flac
.Ape
.shn
.tta
and there is an apple lossless and a Windows Lossless, but they aren’t very widely used.
Everything that isn’t those formats is Lossy. MP3, WMA, OGG, MPC, AAC, Mp4 are all LOSSY.
And you can’t tell if something is lossless just by looking at the bitrate. All of these files have Variable bitrate capability - even the lossless ones.
I read the properties for the mum files, and it said winamp media file, so i assumed it was mp3 (i didn’t know how to find out) when it was WMV, i guess all my files are wmv (default conversion, dammit). I’ll repost sometime.
Lossless data compression uses compression algorithms that allow the exact original data to be reconstructed from the compressed data. Lossy data compression does not allow the exact original data to be reconstructed from the compressed data.
Lossy compression can shrink a CD to almost 1/10th of its original size, since alot of that data is not necessary and is therefore thrown away. The best lossy codecs are OGG, LAME MP3, MPC and MP4
Lossless compression generally manages compression ratios of 1/2 to even 1/3… But since it doesn’t throw any data away, it can’t shrink nearly as much as lossy. Classical music is relatively easy to compress and you can often get 1/5 compression or better. But any music with drums, snares, mutliple instruments, human voice etc, will be harder to compress. The best lossless formats are FLAC, True Audio and APE.