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My girlfriend accidently bought an audio book on the internet and she saved it on my hard disk in windows media audio format (.wma) and now she asks me how to listen to it. I'm a bit puzzled this format still survived.

I'm on ArchLinux, kernel 4.2.1-1-ARCH. My first idea was simply trying to read it with VLC as it usually is a general problem solver for audio files and comes with a couple of codecs. But it didn't work.

Second idea was converting, I usually use Audacity for quick format swaps, but after several attempts of exporting to ogg/vorbis or ogg/opus I noticed Audacity already failed to read the proprietary file format.

I looked up the codecs section on arch wiki but it does not contain any hints for WMA. How to proceed?

How to convert audio/x-ms-wma to audio/ogg, audio/vorbis, or audio/opus format?

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In the community repo, there's a package called audio-convert. Install it with pacman -S audio-convert and it should do the trick.

Remember to also install the optional packages: mplayer (needed for wma support) and vorbis-tools (for ogg).

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  • how? audio-convert creates a 245kB mp3 file from a 280MB wma file. the result sounds like r2-d2. it does not offer ogg formats. – soc1c Sep 30 '15 at 17:31
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    Installed mplayer and vorbis-tools? They're the optional packages you need. pacman tells you to do it after installing audio-convert. – parazyd Sep 30 '15 at 17:38
  • good hint, maybe you want to update your answer with some more details. meanwhile i figured the wma file is drm protected. i guess i was digging in the wrong direction. thanks anyways! – soc1c Sep 30 '15 at 18:22

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