WMA Format

File Format Description

WMA or Windows Media Audio, is a proprietary compressed audio file format developed by Microsoft. Conceived as a competitor to MP3, WMA has now become a competitor to AAC and OGG as well. WMA is a versatile lossless audio format that is capable of both VBR (Variable Bit-rate) and CBR (Constant Bit-rate), thus allowing allocation of more bits (less compression) to the more complex parts of an audio track. This gives better and uniform audio quality across the track.

WMA also supports DRM (Digital Rights Management) through a combination of elliptic curve cryptography key exchange, block ciphers, stream ciphers, and the SHA-1hashing function. This allows downloading of music from such services as Yahoo Music, Napster, and Virgin Digital. WMA is also an ideal format for ripping audio CDs, giving the same audio quality as the original audio track

WMA Playback Problem

WMA is compatible with many Windows-based programs, like Windows Media Player. However, when you attempt to play WMA songs on Mac platform, say playing WMA on iTunes, you'll find it unsupported. In this case, you can either download a different media player which is workable on Mac platform as well as support WMA format, or convert WMA to Mac supported audio format.