Windows Media Audio - Development History

Development History

The first WMA codec was based on earlier work by Henrique Malvar and his team which was transferred to the Windows Media team at Microsoft. Malvar was a senior researcher and manager of the Signal Processing Group at Microsoft Research, whose team worked on the MSAudio project. The first finalized codec was initially referred to as MSAudio 4.0. It was later officially released as Windows Media Audio, as part of Windows Media Technologies 4.0. Microsoft claimed that WMA could produce files that were half the size of equivalent-quality MP3 files; Microsoft also claimed that WMA delivered "near CD-quality" audio at 64 kbit/s. The former claim however was rejected by some audiophiles. RealNetworks also challenged Microsoft's claims regarding WMA's superior audio quality compared to RealAudio.

Newer versions of WMA became available: Windows Media Audio 2 in 1999, Windows Media Audio 7 in 2000, Windows Media Audio 8 in 2001, and Windows Media Audio 9 in 2003. Microsoft first announced its plans to license WMA technology to third-parties in 1999. Although earlier versions of Windows Media Player played WMA files, support for WMA file creation was not added until the seventh version. In 2003, Microsoft released new audio codecs that were not compatible with the original WMA codec. These codecs were Windows Media Audio 9 Professional, Windows Media Audio 9 Lossless, and Windows Media Audio 9 Voice.

All versions of WMA released since version 9.0 - namely 9.1, 9.2 and 10 - have been backwards compatible with the original v9 decoder and are therefore not considered separate codecs. The sole exception to this is the WMA 10 Professional codec whose Low Bit Rate (LBR) mode is only backwards compatible with the older WMA Professional decoders at half sampling rate (similar to how HE-AAC is backwards compatible with AAC-LC). Full fidelity decoding of WMA 10 Professional LBR bitstreams requires a WMA version 10 or newer decoder.