WMA

WMA (Windows Media Audio) is an audio codec developed by Microsoft and used as the native format for compressed audio to be played in Windows Media Player, as WMV is for video. WMA is always, in practice, encapsulated by the ASF container format, whereupon it becomes a "WMA file" and takes on the extension ".wma".

The normal WMA codec is lossy (it loses some of its data in the course of compressing it), but there is a WMA Lossless variant, as well as another version optimized for speech rather than music.

Sample files

 * https://telparia.com/fileFormatSamples/audio/wma/

Links

 * WMA: Wikipedia article
 * Microsoft's Windows Media page
 * Windows Media encryption algorithm description
 * WMA decoder source code