WMA and MP3 formats
WMA is an audio file format developed by Microsoft (www.microsoft.com), the maker of Windows Media Player. It may not be as popular as MP3, but it is still supported by a vast number of players and jukeboxes, including Winamp, Sonique, MusicMatch and J. River’s Media Jukebox.
WMA is an audio format, like mp3, aac, etc. It’s not a device. It’s just a file type, much like .doc, .zip, and all that.
Windows Media Audio (.wma)
Versions of Windows Media Player that support this file type:
Windows Media Player 7
Windows Media Player for Windows XP
Windows Media Player 9 Series
Windows Media Player 10
Windows Media Player 11
Windows Media Audio (.wma) files are Advanced Systems Format (.asf) files that include audio that is compressed with the Windows Media Audio (WMA) codec. By using a separate extension, users can install multiple players on their computer and associate certain players with the .wma extension for playback of audio-only sources.
File format based in ASF (Advanced Systems Format) that wraps an audio bitstream. This web site documents versions of the format that contain bitstreams encoded by Windows Media Audio 9. Some WMA files may also employ Windows Media Audio 7 and 8 codecs.
Windows Media Audio Professional (WMA Pro) was recently released to address limitations in WMA Standard. It supports multichannel encoding and high resolutions (24bit, high sampling rates)
Since it’s backwards incompatible with WMA Std, Microsoft took the opportunity to make a high quality encoder out of it. Meanwhile WMA Std lost even to MP3 in an informal public listening test, WMA Pro was ranked at the top (next to other high quality formats) in a similar test.
These days, Microsoft is pushing the Pro codec for inclusion in the next generation DVD standard as standard audio format.
About MP3
MP3 is a compressed audio format that allows for smaller file sizes with similar sound quality to PCM WAV format, the format found on normal music CDs you would buy in a store.
MP3, which is an acronym for MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, is an audio encoding format. It is one of the most popular audio compression and decompression (codec) format today because of its ability to put music into manageable files, thus making downloading over the internet easy.
The advantage of MP3 is that it can be broken up into pieces, and each piece is still playable. The feature that makes this possible (headerless file format) also means that MP3 files can be made to stream across the net real-time (assuming the playback bitrate and speed of the Internet connection are compatible). Another important fact to understand about MP3 files is that they can be recorded different bandwidth to produce different sounding and performing files. Now there is a lot of MP3 Converters over the internet.