Data Flow

WMA, the Windows Media Format, is a format created (well, actually, mostly blueprinted from MP3 with some addition of their own code) by Microsoft for compressed audio transmission (well, actually, more oriented towards sale and lockout of "copyrighted" music).

WMA subsystem, codecs, and associated software (or rather, litter) are bundled with most current versions of Windows.

There is a way to remove WMP.

The problem with WMA is that to play back the WMA files, the player actually has to contact the WMA interface which checks whether there is a licence installed for the files' playback. In other words, with the rest of the WMA subsystem taken down, and with a WMA plugin for a player such as Winamp or XMPlay, it won't be possible to play anything.

Fortunately, there is the mighty MPlayer, a universal media player capable of pretty much anything, originally developed for Unix operating systems. There is also MPUI, a Windows GUI for MPlayer. MPlayer runs great on Windows, taking advantage of any codecs if installed, and includes a "demoronised" version of WMA and WMV codecs which will play back any WMA or WMV file regardless of whether it's licence-protected or not.

For those who have lost their licence files (in a reinstall or somesuch misadventure), or have (rightfully and truthfully) removed the WMP monster altogether, this is a major boon.

To decode to wave, MPlayer has to be run with a "PCM file" output specified, like so:

mplayer -ao pcm:file=smile.wav

The resulting wave file can then be recoded to some other (free) format, or if quality loss is a problem, encoded to a lossless format like FLAC.