WMA in 2026 — who still uses it
WMA (Windows Media Audio) was Microsoft's answer to MP3 in the late 1990s and 2000s. It saw heavy adoption in three places: professional dictaphones (Olympus, Philips, Sony) that captured directly to WMA for desktop transfer to a Windows machine; institutional archives (legal firms, healthcare practices, insurance investigators) that built workflows around Windows Media Player and never migrated; and pre-2010 Windows Voice Recorder recordings made by anyone using the built-in Windows app. None of those archives have disappeared — they've just become harder to process because most modern audio software has dropped WMA support.
Why direct WMA support matters for archival projects
The standard advice — "convert to MP3 first using ffmpeg" — works but adds friction at scale. For an archival project digitising a thousand WMA dictaphone files, the transcode step alone adds hours of compute time and (since WMA is already lossy) a small but non-zero accuracy loss vs decoding the WMA directly into the transcription engine. MDisBetter skips that step.
What you get back
The same structured Markdown output as for any other format: a top heading, sub-sections at topic shifts, properly punctuated paragraphs, and timestamps ([HH:MM:SS]) at section boundaries. We do not identify speakers, so the transcript reads as continuous prose. For dictaphone recordings (typically single-speaker, professional dictation) that is exactly the right shape: a clean paragraph-structured document.