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I did a backup of several music files from my older Windows XP system. Now I can play all the .MP3 files but not all the .WMA. There are some kinds of WMA files that can be reproduced without problems, may refute this in the picture below. The right file can be played, the left isn't.

enter image description here

I have long been looking different sites, Q&A from here, installing many packages but not luck. An example is this answer.

What can I do?

My system: Ubuntu 11.10 32b. Player: Banshee & VLC

Community
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Lucio
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2 Answers2

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The files are maybe protected by Windows Media DRM. One solution is to play and record them without DRM with your windows system, another is to use a tool like FreeMe2. You could also burn the files as audio cd and rip them again.

The Free Software Foundation calls it: "Digital Restrictions Management".

Tip: Stop using Windows Media Audio. Use another audio file format such as Mp3 or if you are an idealist Ogg Vorbis. If you love lossless sound you could use FLAC. See also the comparison of audio formats.

defective by design

BuZZ-dEE
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Several years ago, I created '*.wma' files with ffmpeg only. I did not check these for "playability" but now I could play only about 60 to 70% of these files with vlc, so about 30 to 40% of them do not play with vlc. All of these files are playing with MS Media Player (Windows 11).

This is independent of the vlc media player version and I could not get information out of vlc (or clvc) under Ubuntu or under Windows to detect what is going wrong.

With

ffmpeg -i "f_old.wma" -acodec copy "f_new.wma"

the files could be played again.

Dirk Heumann
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