WMA Formatted Files from Living Bible Studies

Living Bible Studies distributes audio recordings of bible studies recorded in WMA format. When available, these files can be downloaded from the website and played on a computer or other device.

Playing WMA Files

When a WMA file is available, a link will be provided, often labeled WMA. Clicking this link will either play the file or allow you to download it to your computer. The exact behaviour will depend on your computer's configuration.

If you have suitable software installed you will be able to play the WMA file on your computer by selecting the link on the website or the file on your computer. A Windows computer will likely have the necessary software installed. Suitable software can be obtained for most other computers.

Most portable media players (A.K.A. MP3 players) are able to play WMA files. Download the WMA file from the website and copy it to the media player the same way you load other audio recordings.

Many CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray players currently in production (including many car stereos) are able to play WMA files from CDR, CDRW, DVDR, and DVDRW media. You can do this by downloading WMA file(s) from the website and burn them to a CDR or other recordable disk using software on your computer. Note that you will be creating a data disk that contains WMA files. Your software will probably also support audio disks as well, which are different and described below. An advantage of the data disk is that a single disk can store many bible studies.

Virtually all CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray players will play audio recorded on a CDR disk. These are audio disks, instead of the data disks described above. You can use your computer to burn an audio disk from a WMA file using the same software that burns data disks. The advantage of the audio disk is greater compatibility among CD players, particularly car stereos. The disadvantage is that you will not be able to fit more than one or two bible studies on a single disk. CDR disks are limited to 80 minutes of audio.

Problems

Unfortunately, Living Bible Studies does not have the resources to diagnose problems with your computer.

WMA files are widely supported, but there are a few potential problems. It is not as popular as MP3, and some devices will not support WMA.

Probably the single biggest problem encountered when distributing WMA files is selecting an encoding rate. WMA, like MP3 and AAC is a compressed audio format. The original WAV recording of about 200 megabytes is compressed to about 20 megabytes in a WMA file. This compression is imporant since we have archives of thousands of bible studies that we want to publish and storage space can be problem. Downloading the file is another issue affecting file size, and compression allows faster downloads and more studies to be placed on your media player or data disk.

Compressed audio formats allow us to choose the compression ratio. High compression comes at the expense of reduced fidelity. For voice recordings such as we distribute, fidelity is not much of a problem and the 10:1 ratio we are using yields good sound. Music is often recorded at much lower ratios to preserve the quality of the music. Most MP3 and WMA players are designed for music and so they are designed for the low compression ratios often used for music. They may not be tested with high ratio files. This can cause problems for users when they buy a device that is advertised to play WMA files, but in fact does not work well with the compression ratio we use. Actually, we use a lower compression ratio than we would like in order to increase compatibility. There is really no way to know if a particular device is going to work with our files without testing it.

The WMA files we are distributing on this site are not DRM (Digital Rights Management) protected. So, you do not need a DRM capable playback device to use these recordings.

Why WMA?

We have selected the WMA format for a variety of reasons. The RealAudio format that we used in the past is generally limited to playback on a computer. Portable players and CD players rarely provide support. Although MP3 is a very popular format, licensing requirements related to this format are unclear at best and cost prohibitive at worst. AAC is a promising format, although it is less commonly encountered than MP3 and WMA. Currently we have not found a licensable AAC encoder that we can efficiently integrate into our production process.