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Anyone know of any software that can convert wma files to wav without any loss of quality e.g. loseless conversion?

Andrew Welch
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Converting a from wma file to wav is technically un-compressing it. You will not be able to regain the quality lost from the original compression, but you shouldn't lose any additional quality as long as the algorithm of the conversion software is decent.

ffmpeg should work well for your needs.

Edit: (Thanks to @evilsoup for the command line given in the comment below)

For converting a directory recursively, you'll want to use find, either with the -exec option, or piping to ffmpeg via xargs. If you want to get fancy, you could install GNU parallel and perform multiple conversions simultaneously. A basic example would be: 

find . -type f -name '*.wma' -exec bash -c 'ffmpeg -i "$0" "${0%.wma}.wav"' '{}' \;

See here for some related information.

Community
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Friend Of George
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  • Thanks for this. Any change of how I would use command line to convert recursively a directory and maintain the directory structure. I have a few thousand files, and I'm not a command line expert so any additional info about ffmpeg would be useful –  Mar 25 '13 at 16:54
  • Unfortunately, I don't have much experience with the command line on the Mac. I was only able to find a few examples from Linux and Windows. I'll see what I can come up with. – Friend Of George Mar 25 '13 at 17:18
  • @FriendOfGeorge FYI, I think the Linux command line is quite similar to the Mac command line (for basic stuff at least). – Saaru Lindestøkke Mar 25 '13 at 20:11
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    For converting a directory recursively, you'll want to use find, either with the -exec option, or piping to ffmpeg via xargs. If you want to get fancy, you could install GNU parallel and perform multiple conversions simultaneously. A basic example would be: find . -type f -name '*.wma' -exec bash -c 'ffmpeg -i "$0" "${0%.wma}.wav"' '{}' \; - see here for some related information. –  Mar 25 '13 at 22:29
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WAV is an uncompressed format. Unless you are merging tracks, reducing the sample rate, or lowering the bit depth (all unlikely to happen by accident), a plain conversion to WAV will always be lossless. Of course, this will not remove noise introduced by the lossy compression on the source material. Basically, any program you find will suffice.

Marcks Thomas
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  • Unfortunately the source is WMA, so I was to convert to wav without further compression. –  Mar 25 '13 at 16:46
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I would like to follow this detailed guide to convert WMA to WAV.

But before the conversion, you should know that from an article here:

WMA is a format with lossy compression. While WAV is uncompressed audio formats.

So the conversion will do not harm to the quality.

clinsonack
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