How long does converting a large WMA library take?

For a few hundred albums, expect an evening of intermittent attention working folder by folder, plus about an hour to re-tag the results in one pass.

Should I delete the WMA files afterwards?

Not immediately. Verify the conversion first, then archive the originals to an external drive rather than deleting them — storage is cheap and mistakes are not always obvious straight away.

What if some of my library is WMA Lossless?

Convert those to FLAC rather than MP3. They are genuine lossless masters, and FLAC keeps that quality at about half the size of WAV with proper tag support.

Will my folder structure survive?

Yes. Filenames are preserved exactly and only the extension changes, so numbering and sort order stay intact — unpack each batch into a mirrored destination folder.

How to Rescue an Old Windows Media Library

The typical case looks like this: an external drive, or a folder carried across three computers, holding a few hundred albums ripped in Windows Media Player somewhere between 2003 and 2012. It represents a lot of CDs and a lot of evenings, and now nothing plays it — not the phone, not the car, not the Sonos.

The job is not difficult, but it benefits from being done in order. Here is a plan that gets a large library out intact without losing an entire weekend or, worse, losing files.

Step 1: Audit before you convert

Spend twenty minutes finding out what you actually have. Sort the folder by file type and by size.

File types. Most libraries are not purely WMA. There will usually be some MP3 already, occasional WAV from a CD burn, sometimes M4A from a later iTunes phase. Only the WMA needs converting; the rest can be left alone or standardised later.

File sizes. This tells you the bitrate. Four-minute tracks around 3.8 MB are 128 kbps rips. Tracks at 2 MB are 64 or 96 kbps, from an era when disk space was scarce. Tracks at 25 MB or more are WMA Lossless, and they deserve different treatment — see below.

Protected files. If any of the library was bought from an online store rather than ripped from CD, those files are probably DRM-protected and will not convert. Identifying them now saves confusion later; the DRM explainer covers how to spot them.

Step 2: Decide the target format once

For the bulk of a library, MP3 at 192 kbps is the answer. It plays on everything, the files are a sensible size, and 192 kbps comfortably preserves whatever a 128 kbps WMA rip contained.

Two exceptions are worth handling separately. If everything is destined for Apple devices, M4A is a better fit. And if you found WMA Lossless files in the audit, convert those to FLAC rather than MP3 — they are genuine lossless masters and throwing that away would be a shame. The bitrate guide covers the reasoning.

Whatever you choose, choose it once. Consistency across a library matters more than squeezing out a marginal quality difference on a subset of it.

Step 3: Convert folder by folder

The batch limit is 300 MB — roughly 50 to 70 typical tracks, or four to six albums. Work through your existing folder structure rather than inventing a new one.

Send an artist folder or a few albums, download the ZIP, unpack it straight into a new destination folder that mirrors the old structure. Repeat. The virtues of this approach are boring but real: each ZIP is recognisable, you always know where you stopped, and nothing gets converted twice.

A few hundred albums typically takes an evening of intermittent attention — start a batch, do something else, come back, unpack, repeat.

Step 4: Re-tag in one pass

Filenames survive conversion exactly, so your folder structure and track numbering stay intact. Embedded tags are less reliable, and WMA is especially prone to losing them.

Rather than fighting this per album, convert everything first and then run the whole finished library through MusicBrainz Picard or a similar tagger. These tools identify tracks by audio fingerprint rather than filename, so they work even when the metadata is entirely missing, and they can process thousands of files in one go. The tags guide covers the specifics.

Step 5: Verify, then archive the originals

Before deleting anything, check three things: that the file count matches, that sizes look consistent, and that a sample from the start, middle and end of the library plays properly.

Then — and this is the part people skip — do not delete the originals. Move them to an external drive or cheap cloud storage and leave them there. They cost almost nothing to keep, and if you discover in six months that a batch was converted at the wrong setting, or that a tagger mangled something, you still have the source. Delete them a year later if you like.

What about the video files?

Libraries of this vintage often contain WMV alongside the WMA: camcorder transfers, recorded webinars, family videos processed on a Windows XP machine. If the audio is the part that matters — a recorded talk, a relative's voice — WMV to MP3 extracts the soundtrack and discards the picture.

And if the library has drifted across formats over the years, audio to MP3 takes M4A, WAV, FLAC, AAC and OGG through the same path, so you can standardise everything to one consistent bitrate in the same session.

Roughly how long

For a 300-album library: twenty minutes auditing, an evening converting in batches, an hour running the tagger, twenty minutes verifying. Call it a weekend evening plus change — considerably less than it took to rip the CDs in the first place, and this time the result will still play in twenty years.

Start with the WMA to MP3 converter, or read the step-by-step guide first if you want the mechanics before the plan.

Rescuing an Old Windows Media Player Library: A Practical Plan