AMR to WMA Converter

Convert AMR to WMA: What This Tutorial Covers

This converter turns an .amr voice recording — the kind an old Android phone, a feature-phone voicemail, or a basic voice-memo app saved — into a .wma (Windows Media Audio) file. This walk-through is for anyone who has an AMR clip that some piece of Windows software won't accept and is asking for a .wma instead. Both ends of this conversion are dated: late-1990s mobile speech audio going into a late-1990s Microsoft codec. So the page is upfront about the one case where WMA is the right target, and the more common case where you should pick MP3 or WAV instead.

How to Convert AMR to WMA

1. Upload Your AMR File: Drag and drop your .amr file onto the page, or click "+ Add Files" to browse. Old voice recorder memos, dumbphone voicemails, and MMS audio attachments all work, and you can queue several at once to convert with the same settings.
2. Pick a Quality Preset: Open Advanced Options and choose a Quality Preset (Lowest through Highest), or set a Custom Bitrate, Constant Bitrate, or Variable Bitrate directly. The output is standard Windows Media Audio — see the walk-through for why a higher bitrate won't make telephone-grade speech sound better.
3. Set Audio Channel, Sample Rate, or Trim: Leave Audio Channel and Audio Sample Rate on "Original" to copy the source, or downmix to Mono and resample for a smaller file. Use Trim to clip out just the part you need.
4. Convert and Download: Click "Convert" and download the WMA file. No sign-up, no watermark.

Walk-through: Choosing a Preset for Voice Audio

The most common mistake is setting the Quality Preset to "Highest" expecting the recording to improve. It won't. Bitrate is a ceiling on how much detail the output can store, not a tool that creates detail — and the detail in an AMR file was fixed the moment the phone recorded it.

AMR-NB, the variant nearly every voice recorder and feature phone used, is a 3GPP speech codec adopted in October 1999. It samples at just 8 kHz and keeps only the 200 Hz–3,400 Hz band — the same narrow telephone bandwidth a phone call carries, enough to make speech intelligible and nothing more. Re-encoding that to WMA at 256 kbps gives you a large, faithful WMA copy of telephone-grade speech; it does not restore the high and low frequencies the codec never captured. (A wideband variant, AMR-WB, samples at 16 kHz for a slightly fuller voice band, but it is far less common in old recordings.)

A practical guide:

• Voice memo or voicemail (the usual case): a Medium preset, roughly 64–96 kbps mono, is plenty. It preserves every frequency the AMR source captured, and anything higher just makes a bigger file for no audible gain.
• You want a comfortable margin: leave Audio Sample Rate on "Original" and pick a higher preset. It never hurts quality — it only costs file size.
• Channels: AMR-NB is single-channel, so leave Audio Channel on "Original" (or set Mono). "Stereo" would just duplicate one channel into both, doubling the file with zero benefit.

Common Errors and How to Fix Them

• "The output sounds muffled, like a phone call" — The source was AMR-NB speech audio (8 kHz, voice-band only). That muffled, bandwidth-limited sound is the original recording, not the conversion. No bitrate or codec choice can widen frequencies the phone never stored.
• "My WMA won't play on my phone, Mac, or browser" — WMA is a proprietary Microsoft format with the narrowest support of the common audio types. Outside a Windows machine or a WMA-aware player like VLC, it often won't open. If the goal is playback rather than feeding old Windows software, convert the AMR to MP3 instead with the AMR to MP3 converter — MP3 plays almost everywhere.
• "A transcription or speech-to-text tool rejected the WMA" — Most transcription services prefer MP3 or WAV and handle WMA poorly or not at all. For Whisper, Otter, Rev, or similar, convert to AMR to WAV for an uncompressed input, or to MP3 for a small universal one.
• "The file is silent or won't load" — Some .amr files are actually saved as .amr.3gp or are truncated downloads. Play the original end-to-end first to confirm it has sound and a clean extension.
• "Stereo came out as mono" — AMR-NB is a single-channel speech codec, so there is no second channel to recover. The mono output is faithful to the source.

When This Doesn't Work

WMA only makes sense when something on the receiving end specifically demands a .wma file — an old Windows Media Player library, a legacy Windows dictation or transcription program, or hardware built around the format. If you simply want an old voice memo to play and share reliably on a modern phone, Mac, or browser, WMA is the wrong target: convert to AMR to MP3 for the widest compatibility, or to AMR to WAV if a tool needs uncompressed audio. And if the .amr is corrupted, partially downloaded, or has the wrong extension, the audio stream may be unreadable and the conversion will fail or truncate — confirm the original plays in full first.

Files you upload are sent over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically a few hours after conversion — no sign-up, no watermark, never shared or made public.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why would I convert an AMR voice memo to WMA instead of MP3?

In most cases you shouldn't. MP3 is more widely supported and at least as good for speech at the same bitrate. WMA is the right pick only when something specifically requires a .wma file — an old Windows Media Player playlist, legacy Windows dictation or transcription software, or hardware that won't accept other formats. For any modern target, a phone, a Mac, or a transcription service, use the AMR to MP3 converter instead. Both AMR and WMA are dated formats from 1999, so converting one to the other is a compatibility move for old tooling, not an upgrade.

Why does my AMR recording sound like telephone quality after converting?

Because it always was. AMR-NB, used by virtually every old voice recorder and feature phone, is a 3GPP speech codec adopted in October 1999 that samples at 8 kHz and keeps only the 200 Hz–3,400 Hz voice band — the same narrow range a phone call carries. Converting to WMA preserves that speech faithfully but cannot regenerate the high and low frequencies a speech codec never recorded. The conversion changes the container and codec, not the underlying recording.

Will converting AMR to WMA improve the sound quality?

No. It changes the codec, not the recording. If the source is AMR-NB speech, the WMA output is a clean copy of telephone-grade audio — a higher bitrate makes the file larger without adding detail that was never captured. WMA is a choice you make for legacy compatibility, not for recovering fidelity. To rescue an old voice memo for everyday playback, MP3 is the better target.

Which WMA codec does the output use, and is stereo preserved?

The converter outputs standard Windows Media Audio (the WMA v2 lossy codec, which Microsoft first released on August 17, 1999 as part of Windows Media Technologies 4.0), stored in the ASF container. Standard WMA encodes up to 48 kHz and a maximum of two channels. An AMR-NB source is mono, so there is no second channel to preserve — the WMA output is correctly single-channel and plays fine on stereo speakers.

Can I rescue old voice memos from a dead or wiped phone this way?

Yes, if you can still get the .amr files off the device or out of a backup. Copy the recordings to your computer, upload them here, and pick a target: WMA only if a specific Windows program needs it, otherwise AMR to MP3 for universal playback. Batch upload lets you convert a whole folder of memos at once with the same settings, which is the fastest way to clear an old call-recording archive.

How are my files handled, and how long do you keep them?

Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically a few hours after conversion. There is no sign-up, no watermark, and your files are never shared or made public. In our testing, a 60-second AMR-NB voice memo converted to a roughly 80–120 KB WMA file at a Medium preset — speech recordings stay small because there is little high-frequency detail to encode.