WMA to WAV Converter
Turn Windows Media Audio files into standard uncompressed WAV that any editor or DAW will open. One caveat worth knowing up front: the WAV we write is 16-bit PCM, so a 24-bit WMA Lossless source comes out at 16-bit depth.
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Why Convert WMA to WAV?
WMA is Microsoft's audio format, built around Windows Media Player and the ripping defaults of older Windows versions. It plays fine on Windows, but outside that world support is patchy: many audio editors, hardware samplers, DJ programs, CD-burning utilities and video editors on macOS will either refuse a .wma file or need an extra codec pack. WAV is the opposite problem to have, which is to say no problem at all, since RIFF WAV with PCM audio is about as close to a universal audio interchange format as exists.
On our side the job runs on our servers with ffmpeg. The WMA stream is decoded with ffmpeg's Windows Media decoders, which cover WMA v1 and v2, WMA Pro, WMA Lossless and WMA Voice, and the decoded samples are written straight into a RIFF WAV container as 16-bit little-endian PCM. There is no filtering step: no resampling request, no volume normalization, no noise reduction. What the decoder produces is what lands in the WAV.
Kept: the sample rate and the channel count. A 48 kHz stereo WMA stays 48 kHz stereo, and a multichannel WMA Pro file keeps its channels. Title, artist and album are carried across as RIFF INFO tags. Lost or changed: bit depth is normalized to 16-bit, so a 24-bit WMA Lossless rip is reduced; embedded cover art is dropped, because every picture stream is discarded during conversion.
This conversion is mostly asked for by people with an old Windows music library or voice recordings they now want to edit. Typical cases: importing lecture or interview recordings into Audacity, feeding tracks to a CD-burning program that wants PCM, or dropping audio onto a video timeline on a Mac that will not read WMA at all. If you only want to listen on a phone, MP3 or M4A will give you a far smaller file than WAV.
How to Convert WMA to WAV
- Check the source first. If the WMA came from a store or a subscription service and will only play on the PC it was downloaded to, it is DRM-protected and cannot be decoded. Use an unprotected copy, or re-rip the CD in Windows Media Player with copy protection turned off.
- Drag your .wma files onto the upload area, or click it to browse. You can drop several at once, and other audio sources such as MP3, M4A, FLAC or AC3 are accepted on this page too.
- Watch the per-file size cap: 50 MB without an account, 100 MB with a free account, higher on Plus and Pro. A guest batch holds up to 10 files.
- Start the conversion. Each file is queued, decoded and re-written as WAV on our servers; typical music-length files finish within a few seconds of the upload completing.
- Download each WAV. The name is your original file name with the .wav extension, so a library converted in a batch keeps its track names.
- Import into your editor. WAV at 16-bit is accepted by Audacity, Reaper, Audition, Logic, Pro Tools, Windows CD burners and video editors without any extra codec.
What This Converter Does
- Writes RIFF WAV with 16-bit little-endian PCM, the depth every audio tool reads.
- Keeps the source sample rate and channel count, including multichannel WMA Pro.
- Decodes WMA v1, v2, Pro, Lossless and Voice streams through ffmpeg's Windows Media decoders.
- Carries the source tags into the WAV as RIFF INFO fields, where your software reads them.
- Accepts a mixed batch: you can drop WMA alongside MP3, FLAC, M4A, AIFF or OGG files on this page.
- Names each output after the input file, which keeps album track order intact.
Video Tutorial
Watch this step-by-step tutorial to learn how to convert WMA files to WAV format online for free using MiConvert.com. No software installation required.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is the WAV so much bigger than the WMA?
WMA stores a compressed approximation of the audio; WAV stores every sample uncompressed. A 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo WAV runs about 10 MB per minute regardless of how small the WMA was, so a few-megabyte album track typically lands in the tens of megabytes.
Does converting to WAV improve the sound?
No. Decoding a lossy WMA to PCM preserves exactly what the WMA contained, including its compression artifacts. The benefit is compatibility and the fact that further edits and saves no longer re-compress the audio each time.
Does it keep 24-bit audio from WMA Lossless?
No. Our WAV output is always 16-bit PCM, so a 24-bit WMA Lossless file loses bit depth. If keeping 24-bit matters, convert that file to FLAC instead: FLAC output preserves the original bit depth and sample rate, and channel layouts up to 8 channels.
Can I choose the sample rate, bit depth or do a mono downmix?
No. There are no quality settings on this page. The sample rate and channel count come straight from the source and the depth is fixed at 16-bit. Resampling or downmixing has to be done in your audio editor after conversion.
My WMA was rejected as DRM-protected, but I own it. What now?
That message also appears for damaged files, because a WMA whose packets mostly fail to decode looks the same to the decoder either way. Try playing it in Windows Media Player: if it plays there but fails here, re-download or re-rip it; if it only plays on one licensed machine, it is protected and no conversion is possible.
What about album art on the WMA?
Cover art is not carried over. Picture streams are dropped on every target we produce, and WAV is a poor home for artwork anyway. Keep the original WMA if you want the image, or re-add art in your tag editor after converting to a format that stores it.
Can I convert a whole WMA music library in one go?
Not in one request. A guest batch takes up to 10 files, a Plus batch 25 and Pro 50, and each IP is limited to 10 conversion jobs per hour on the free tiers. Large libraries need to be split across several batches.
How long do you keep my files?
The uploaded WMA is deleted as soon as the job finishes. The converted WAV stays downloadable for about four hours and is then deleted automatically. Conversions run on our servers, not in your browser, and we do log file names, sizes and outcomes.