Thursday, 02 May 2019
Can I convert WMA files to WAV using Winamp?
If you have the ‘full’ version of Winamp it can play WMA files, and you can try writing to a WAV output file using the Nullsoft Disk Writer plugin… but sometimes it won’t work – you get a message saying «Sorry, no .wav writing support for DRM enabled WRM streams».
This figures, I guess. Winamp is basically playing by the rules set by Microsoft et al. There’s no technical reason for not doing this… it’s a «policy» thing. One way around this kind of restriction is to use something like «Total Recorder» (from www.highcriteria.com)… this is a shareware program that basically defines itself to Windows as an audio device driver, so basically you pick Total Recorder as your default Wav output device, and it will record whatever you are playing (no matter what the source of it is), and pass on the data to your actual sound card drivers or whatever for playing.
If you have a full duplex soundcard you should not even need Total Recorder – if you play a .wma file you may be able to record it as it is playing with a standard WAV recording program such as Goldwave (www.goldwave.com). If you try to do this, don’t forget to bring up your Windows recording mixer (double click on the little yellow speaker in your systray), then select Options / Properties / Recording, then make sure the WAV slider is selected, not muted, and set to a reasonable volume (this may vary a little bit depending on your version of Windows and what sound card you have).
Total Recorder may actually give you better results, since it is intercepting the digital stream before it is sent to the soundcard, whereas recording the other way, you are probably recording output produced after going through digital to analogue and then analogue to digital conversion in your sound card, which will likely result in some quality loss.
