Lossless WMA files supported

So what do I do with the 2 Terabytes of Lossless Windows Media Audio files I have been happily playing with J River or Windows Media Player for years ? I have Tidal as well and play from a PC into a NAD M51 DAC and so on into my audio gear.

Ideally I would want Roon to incorporate my large WMA collection and thus make recommendations based on it that I can follow up on Tidal. Let me know when I should jump in and buy.

We can look into this… there is no way for us to support WMA without a licensing mess on anything but Windows, so we haven’t added support for this publicly.

I always suggest people leave WMA and go to something much more open, like FLAC. Because your WMA’s are lossless, the conversion should be bit perfect. Since you already use JRiver, they support doing this exactly, including preserving your tags! http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=79143.0

Anyway, I’ll tack this on the list of things to investigate.

I would also look at dBPowerAmp for the batch conversion. I have had many issues using JR conversion, where dBPowerAmp just works

But ROON supports ALAC and AIFF. And you don’t care about the license mess in this case?
Sorry danny it sounds strange…

@cas, AIFF has no compression, so it’s not subject to patents. ALAC is open sourced and explicitly patent licensed by Apple.

MP3/AAC, we use the operating system’s built in codecs, and we don’t supports operating system’s that lack those codecs (Windows XP for example).

Well, you could support it only on Windows. A quick OS check to enable/disable features. But, really, I completely agree with you. Especially since Windows 10 now comes with native flac support so the conversion would still allow them to use Windows Media Player if they wanted. Win - Win! :smiley:

Yeah I have Windows 10 now and it does play FLAC through the Windows Media Player and ALAC and others… great. J River is probably in trouble now, particularly as Windows 10 player now supports more video/dvd codecs…although J River does " Hi Res" which Windows Media Player doesn’t. However it is all irrelevant… I converted my WMA files to FLAC in May on Danny’s suggestion using DbPoweramp and made that folder an organised folder in Roon…it reassembled and arranged my 2 Tbytes of music very well and I haven’t looked back. Roon is now my media player with TIDAL integrated, it is wonderful.

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What do you mean by “Hi Res”. I use Windows 10 Apps it with 24/192 Flacs and the latest WASAPI with the latency < 10ms works great, too. Of course WMP is not good for 2 TB music :slight_smile: , for that we have roon :slight_smile:

Sorry, I know this is an old thread, but I’m trying Roon now and I’m very disappointed that WMA lossless still isn’t supported. It’s kind of a deal breaker for me. Is there some perspective of this situation changing in the near future?

Why not simply convert the WMA Lossless to FLAC or ALAC…or even to AIFF??

It’s likely to take 2-3 minutes or less per album and is usually the kind of thing that can happen overnight

It will also future proof you for other platforms in the future as WMA Lossless is simply not at the frontline any more

Yep I dont miss WMA at all…having jumped over to FLAC I realise how much wider and more universally useful it is. Plays on more devices, car , phone etc

Actually I need WMA because OneDrive only streams music in MP3 and WMA (all resolutions, up to 24/96) to Groove Music. Groove reads Flacs, but only if files are stored locally. In OneDrive, I have more than 1.5 TB of lossless music available anywhere. Yes, I could convert my local (home) library to Flac, but since even LMS decodes WMA, it would be only for the sake of Roon. Which is a bit annoying, really.