Upload a WMA file and get a WAV back. No signup, no watermark, no limit on how many.
WMA is Microsoft's lossy format from the Windows Media era, and it is the reason a great many CD collections ripped between 2000 and 2010 are now awkward to play.
Where you run into it: Old Windows Media Player rips, corporate archives, CDs backed up on a PC two laptops ago.
What it costs you: Support outside Windows ranges from poor to none: phones, Macs and car stereos mostly will not open it, which is why it is nearly always a source and never a destination.
WAV is raw, uncompressed PCM in a Microsoft container: the audio exactly as it was sampled, with nothing clever done to it.
Where you run into it: Recording sessions, sample libraries, video editors, anything that has to be edited rather than merely listened to.
What it costs you: It is enormous — roughly 10 MB a minute in CD-quality stereo — and it carries almost no tagging, so a folder of WAVs is a folder of filenames.
WMA is not one format but a family, and which member you have decides what this conversion means. Standard WMA and WMA Pro are lossy, so decoding them to WAV expands damaged audio into a large file. WMA Voice was built for speech at very low rates. WMA Lossless — Windows Media Player's own Lossless rip setting, which a lot of 2000s CD collections were ripped with — was never damaged at all, and there the WAV is a faithful uncompressed copy. All four are read here, and all four come out as 16-bit PCM at whatever sample rate the original used.
The failure people hit on this page is DRM. Tracks bought from the old MSN Music or Zune stores, and anything ripped with “Copy protect music” ticked in Windows Media Player — which was the default for years — carry Windows Media DRM. The audio inside is encrypted and the licence lives in the Windows installation that acquired it, so no converter can open the file, this one included. If a WMA plays on one ageing PC and nowhere else, that is the reason, and the answer is not a different converter.
Yes, entirely, and there is no cap on how many files you convert. No account, no watermark, no trial.
It depends which WMA you brought. From standard WMA or WMA Pro nothing further is lost and nothing recovered, as with any lossy source. From WMA Voice you will get an honest reproduction of something quite thin, because that codec was designed for dictation rather than music. From WMA Lossless you get the audio exactly as it was ripped, assuming it was 16-bit, which CD rips are. The only WMA that fails outright is a protected one — see below.
About ten times a typical 128 kbps rip, but only around double a WMA Lossless file, which was already storing every sample and merely compressing them. One quirk to check: a good many Windows Media rips were made at 48 kHz rather than 44.1, and the rate passes through untouched, so those come out roughly a tenth larger again than the CD-rate arithmetic suggests.
Not here. WMA can be read but not written by this converter — ffmpeg decodes it happily, and encoding back to it would mean a format almost nothing plays. If you need the original WMA, keep it rather than recreating it.
The file is uploaded to do the conversion — nothing here runs in your browser — and both your upload and the converted result are deleted the moment the file is sent back. Nothing is stored and nothing is logged beyond the request itself.