It's also known as WMA Standard. Microsoft created it to compete against MP3, that was quickly becoming the de-facto standard format for lossy compression.
Even though Microsoft claims it is able to deliver the same quality as
MP3 at half the bitrates, that statement is certainly false. A more
realistic number would be same quality at around 25% smaller bitrates -
and that applies to low bitrates only. At 128kbps, it is easily beaten
by Lame.
WMA Std is the second most widespread lossy format (only losing to the
ubiquitous MP3), mostly thanks to Microsoft's aggressive marketing
tactics.
Windows Media Audio Professional
Windows Media Audio Professional (WMA Pro) was recently released to
address limitations in WMA Standard. It supports multichannel encoding
and high resolutions (24bit, high sampling rates)
Since it's backwards incompatible with WMA Std, Microsoft took the
opportunity to make a high......
