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WMA
What is a WMA file?
Microsoft's audio format from the Windows Media era. Ripped CD collections are full of it.
What WMA is
WMA is a codec: the encoding itself rather than the box it travels in. It is used for handing a finished file over.
The extension is .wma, and the full name is Windows Media Audio. Both matter less than what the file can hold, which is what the rest of this page is about.
Where WMA came from
Microsoft published it in 1999.
A format that has been readable for that long is a format worth trusting with something you want back in ten years.
The specification belongs to its vendor
Reading it outside the vendor’s own software depends on work done by other people, usually by inspection rather than by documentation. That mostly works and occasionally does not, which is the reason to convert anything you intend to keep.
It has been superseded
The people who made it have moved on, and support is being withdrawn rather than added. Anything still in this format is worth moving while the tools to move it are still around.
Detail is traded for size
WMA discards detail to stay small, and what it discards does not come back. That is the right trade for something being looked at and the wrong one for something being edited: each re-save takes another bite.
How many audio channels
Up to 8. Two covers stereo and is what almost everything is; more than two is surround, and it is the part most likely to be folded down when converting to a format that does not define it.
What opens WMA
Windows Media Player and VLC read it, and so do most programs of the same kind.
If a file will not open, the format is rarely the problem — it is more often that the program predates it. Converting to something older is the reliable way past that, and it is what the rest of this site is for.
Opening it in a browser
No browser reads it.
That is the single most common reason to convert it: not that the format is bad, but that the place you want to show the file cannot read it.
It is a delivery format
WMA is meant to be handed over rather than worked in. Editing one is possible and rarely pleasant; the sane approach is to change the source and export again.
What goes wrong with it
The recurring complaints: support outside its home ground is uneven.
None of these is a reason to avoid the format. They are the things worth knowing before you are surprised by one, which is a different claim and a more useful one.
The facts, in one place
| Extension | .wma |
|---|---|
| Media type | audio/x-ms-wma |
| Published by | Microsoft |
| First published | 1999 |