Windows Media Audio

Windows Media Audio is a proprietary compressed audio file format used by Microsoft. It was initially a competitor to the MP3 format, but with the advent o Apple's iTunes, it has positioned as a competitor to the advanced audio coding format used by Apple.

Files in this format can be played using Windows Media Player, Winamp, and many other alternative media players.

Windows Media Audio features digital rights management using a combination of elliptic curve cryptography key exchange, DES block cipher, a custom block cipher, RC4 stream cipher and the SHA-1 hashing function.

See also

• Windows Media Video - the video counterpart
• List of audio formats

External Links

• Homepage at Microsoft
• Description of the algorithm used for WMA encryption