Transcribe WMA
Windows Media Audio
WMA (Windows Media Audio) is a proprietary audio compression format developed by Microsoft as part of Windows Media framework. Offering competitive compression rates and excellent audio quality, WMA is widely used in Windows environments, Windows Media Player, Xbox, and various portable audio devices. WMA supports multiple codecs including WMA Standard, WMA Pro (high-resolution), and WMA Lossless. It uploads here as it is, in over 100 languages.
Upload Your WMA File
Drag and drop your file here, or click to browse
Supported: every audio and video format โข Max 50 MB
No sign-up โ the first 5 minutes are transcribed free
Technical Specifications
- Codec:
- WMA Standard, WMA Pro, WMA Lossless
- Bit Rate:
- 48-320 kbps (Standard), up to 768 kbps (Plus)
- Sample Rate:
- 8 kHz - 96 kHz
- Channels:
- Mono / Stereo / 5.1 / 7.1 (WMA Pro)
- Max Size:
- Up to 5GB per file
Popular WMA Transcription Use Cases
Discover how professionals use WMA transcription to save time and boost productivity
Windows Voice Recordings
Transcribe WMA voice memos, dictations, and recordings from Windows Sound Recorder and other Windows apps.
Windows Media Content
Convert WMA audiobooks, podcasts, and media from Windows Media Player libraries to searchable text.
Corporate Recordings
Transcribe WMA business meetings, conference calls, and presentations recorded in Microsoft environments.
Legacy Audio Archives
Convert older WMA audio archives and collections to modern text format for archival and search.
Portable Device Audio
Transcribe WMA recordings from portable media players, older smartphones, and digital voice recorders.
Streaming Audio
Convert WMA streams and downloads from Windows Media services to text for analysis and documentation.
Why Choose Our WMA Transcription?
Industry-leading features designed specifically for WMA files
Windows Integration
Native support in Windows OS and Microsoft applications, making it easy to record and manage WMA files.
Efficient Compression
WMA provides excellent compression ratios, often outperforming MP3 at lower bitrates for voice content.
High-Resolution Audio
WMA Pro supports high-resolution audio up to 24-bit/96kHz, ensuring crystal-clear transcription quality.
Variable Bitrate
VBR encoding optimizes file size while maintaining consistent audio quality for accurate speech recognition.
Multi-Channel Support
WMA Pro handles 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound, perfect for transcribing professional video productions.
Metadata Rich
Extensive metadata support including artist, album, genre, and custom tags for better organization.
How WMA Transcription Works
Three simple steps to convert your WMA files to text
Upload WMA File
Drag and drop your WMA file or click to browse. Files up to Up to 5GB per file supported.
AI Processing
Our AI transcribes your WMA file in about 1 minute 28 seconds per hour of audio, detecting speakers and adding timestamps.
Download Results
Get your transcript in TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT, or JSON format. Edit and export as needed.
No credit card โข no sign-up โข first 5 minutes free
A format from the Windows Media era
WMA belongs to a decade that has passed. Windows Media Player wrote it by default, Dictaphone software shipped with it, and a great many institutional archives are still sitting in it โ which is exactly why it still arrives here.
The files show their age: 28 of them, median 19 minutes 2 seconds at 65 kbps. That is a low bitrate by modern standards but a perfectly ordinary one for a voice recording of that era, and it transcribes normally.
WMA uploads as it is. There is no need to convert to MP3 first โ that would add a lossy generation on top of one the file already has.
How long it actually takes
These are medians measured on our production cluster, expressed as time per hour of audio.
| Engine | One hour of audio | Faster than real time |
|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA Parakeet | 18 seconds | 200ร |
| Whisper large-v3-turbo (default) | 1 min 28 s | 41ร |
| Speaker labeling, added on top | +2 min 7 s | 28ร |
Against the WMA files uploaded here: the median, just over 19 minutes, comes back in about 28 seconds. Nine in ten are under 89 minutes.
Will an old 65 kbps recording transcribe well?
Usually yes, and the bitrate is not the thing to worry about. Everything is resampled to 16 kHz mono before transcription, and 65 kbps is comfortably above the roughly 32 kbps mark where lossy artefacts start to blur consonants.
What tends to limit an old WMA is the recording, not the codec: a lapel microphone at the far end of a room, tape hiss carried through a digitisation, or several people talking across each other. Those are audible in the file and they are what shapes the transcript.
Which limit you will hit first
Duration, overwhelmingly. At 65 kbps, 5 GB would hold more than 170 hours; the largest WMA processed here was 63 MB.
- Long archive recordings are the usual case and comfortably within the size limit.
- Anything past eight hours needs splitting โ cut between sessions rather than mid-sentence.
WMA Transcription FAQ
Common questions about transcribing WMA files
Transcription time scales with the duration of the audio, not the size of the file. An hour takes about 1 minute 28 seconds on the default engine โ a measured median across our production cluster โ and speaker labels add about 2 minutes 7 seconds per hour on top.
After your WMA transcript
- choosing an export format โ TXT, DOCX, PDF, SRT, VTT or JSON โ which one fits what you are about to do with the text.
- timestamped transcription โ every segment is time-coded, so you can click a line and hear that moment.
- audio to text converter โ all 35 formats we accept, with measured processing times for each engine.
- transcription app for Mac โ transcribe offline with Whisper and Parakeet, free, without uploading anything.
Related Audio Formats
We also support transcription for these formats
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