Many users still remember the days when the standard "Universal Player" was the main program for viewing video on a computer. It did not shine with functionality, and it did not differ in friendliness towards inexperienced users. Only in 2000, Microsoft introduced the Windows Media Player 7 application to the public.
It differed from its predecessor not only in convenience, but also in the fact that the WMA format created by the company itself appeared in it. What is it and where can it be used? As we already said, it was developed in the "dungeons" of Microsoft, where by then they had already completely realized that they could not fight the victorious procession of MP3s.
In addition, their standard players at that time did not support it very adequately, and therefore rapidly lost popularity. As a “popular” alternative, the WMA format was created, which since then began by all hook or by crook in the Windows family of OS. Such practice had little success, and the policy of the leadership of the Redmond company played a significant role in this.
To begin with, they made the WMA format completely proprietary - closed for distribution, modification and use in third-party products. And if for their “Office” this practice had a positive effect (after all, nobody canceled the monopoly), then entering the multimedia format market, which was already crowded with players, was frankly stupid.
However, the characteristics of the WMA (Windows Media Audio) itself are not so bad at all. Thus, the manufacturer claims that the music file compressed in it with a bitrate of 160 kbit / s is in no way inferior in quality to an MP3 file with a similar indicator of 256 kbit / s. The statement is controversial, and its first versions did not support a higher bitrate, which made the WMA format not very popular among music lovers. In addition, at a sound frequency above 15 kHz, everything “superfluous” was ruthlessly cut off, so there was no question of any “CD quality”.
We must pay tribute to Microsoft: using their almost unlimited resources, they have achieved the introduction of support for their offspring in almost all hardware and software players, so today the desire to change the WMA format to MP3 for playing it in your player has lost its relevance. Moreover, from the distant 1995, when its first version appeared, the codec “grew up” to its ninth reincarnation, in which many errors of past releases were corrected.
In particular, the sound quality has increased significantly, the possibility of two-pass VBR encoding has appeared, which automatically transferred the “ever forgotten” WMA to the category of fairly strong players in the digital audio market. In addition, the very famous and popular Winamp player can "rob" music CDs into it, for which only the out_wma.dll plug-in is needed.
Thus, it makes little sense to convert WMA to MP3 , because thanks to Microsoft's persistence, this codec, along with competing formats, is supported by all devices and programs for playing digital music. In addition, as a result of such conversion, the sound quality can deteriorate significantly, which is unlikely to please you.