How to open .WMA files (Windows Media Audio) on Android, Windows and Linux

You’ve found your old music collection on a backup drive, ripped from CDs with Windows Media Player years ago, and every song is a .wma file. Or you’ve copied the voice recordings off an old phone and they all end in .amr. Your new phone’s music app ignores them, and a newer PC may not do much better.

Both are older formats that modern apps often skip, but the files themselves are fine. Folders, a free file manager for Android, Windows and Linux, finds and sorts them on every system, and its audio player plays them where the system can decode them: AMR recordings on Android, WMA music on Windows, and usually both on Linux. It’s offline and needs no account.

What is a .wma file?

WMA stands for Windows Media Audio, Microsoft’s audio format from the late 1990s and part of its Windows Media family. The sound sits in Microsoft’s ASF container. For years, Windows Media Player ripped CDs to WMA by default, which is why so many old collections are full of it. There are several flavours: standard WMA (lossy, like MP3), WMA Pro, WMA Lossless and WMA Voice.

Some WMA files bought from online music shops in the 2000s came with copy protection (DRM) tied to a licence. Many of those licence services have since closed.

AMR is a different story. It stands for Adaptive Multi-Rate, a speech codec standardised for mobile phone calls. It’s built for voice, not music, and gets by on tiny bit rates: the common narrowband version runs at 4.75 to 12.2 kbit/s, so an hour of speech takes only about 5 MB. Older phones’ voice recorders and many call-recording apps saved their recordings as .amr. A wideband version (“HD Voice”) sounds clearer and usually uses the .awb extension.

Extension	What it is
.wma	Windows Media Audio: music, often from old CD rips or 2000s music shops
.amr	Adaptive Multi-Rate speech: voice memos and call recordings from phones

What they have in common today: Android’s own media system doesn’t include WMA, so many phone music apps can’t play it, and AMR isn’t something most Windows set-ups play out of the box.

How to open a .wma file with Folders

On Android

1. Download Folders from the download section, install it, and allow access to your files when it asks.
2. Get the files onto the phone. If your old music is on a PC, you can move it over Wi-Fi or copy it with a cable.
3. Open the folder in Folders, or type .wma or .amr in the search box to find them in that folder and every folder inside it.
4. Tap an .amr recording and it plays in Folders’ audio player. From another app, use Open with → Folders.

WMA is the exception on a phone: Android has no WMA decoder, so Folders’ player says Can’t play this file. Use VLC for Android for those, or play them in Folders on a Windows or Linux computer.

On Windows and Linux

1. Install Folders: on Windows with the setup program or MSIX, on Linux from a deb, rpm, AppImage, Flatpak, Snap or tar.gz package.
2. Browse to the old drive or folder in Folders and double-click a file.
3. On Windows, right-click a .wma file in File Explorer and choose Open with → Folders.

On Windows, WMA plays, but AMR doesn’t: the media engine Folders ships there leaves out the AMR decoder, so use VLC for voice recordings. On Linux, Folders uses the system’s own media library, which normally plays both.

What you can do with it in Folders

• Play and pause, jump back or forward 10 seconds and drag the seek bar. The 10-second jump back helps when you’re typing up an old interview or a recorded call.
• On a computer, play a whole rescued WMA collection in one queue with Toolbox → Music player (in the side menu).
• Rename recordings with useful names instead of Voice0012.amr, move them into folders, share them, or compress to ZIP. AMR files are so small that years of voice memos fit in one email-friendly archive.

Folders plays these files; it doesn’t convert them. And no app can play a DRM-protected WMA without its licence, Folders included.

Other ways to open .wma files

• Windows Media Player (or the newer Media Player app) plays ordinary WMA files on Windows.
• VLC plays both WMA and AMR on Android, Windows and Linux.
• Audacity, with its FFmpeg add-on, imports both, so you can clean up a recording and export it.
• Linux music players play WMA once the FFmpeg plug-in for GStreamer is installed (often a package called gstreamer1.0-libav).

Problems opening a .wma file?

A WMA file asks for a licence or refuses to play. It’s DRM-protected. If the shop’s licence service is gone, the file can’t be unlocked. If you still own the CD, rip it again to an open format.

A call recording has only your voice. That’s the recording, not the player. Since Android 9, call-recording apps generally can’t capture the other side of the call, so many recordings contain only the microphone.

An AMR recording is silent or cuts off early. The recorder may have been interrupted, or the copy from the old phone didn’t finish. Copy it again from the original if you still can.

The recording ends in .3gp instead. Some phone recorders put AMR speech inside a 3GP file. Folders opens those in its video player; see how to open 3GP files.

Questions people ask

Can I play WMA files on Android? Not in most phone apps, Folders’ player included, because Android has no WMA decoder. VLC for Android plays them. Folders on Windows or Linux plays them too.

What app opens AMR files? Folders plays them on Android and, usually, Linux; VLC plays them everywhere, Windows included. Most old phones that made them could play them too.

How do I convert WMA or AMR to MP3? Folders doesn’t convert audio. VLC’s Convert / Save option, Audacity or the command-line tool ffmpeg (ffmpeg -i memo.amr memo.mp3) will do it.

Is WMA better than MP3? Standard WMA and MP3 are similar in quality, and WMA Lossless keeps every detail. Today the bigger difference is that MP3 plays almost everywhere and WMA doesn’t.

More audio guides: how to open MP3 files and how to open M4A and AAC recordings. Or see all 382 file types Folders opens.