Contributor I

Answered

NAS & WMA - No Longer Working

Forum|Forum|17 days ago
September 19, 2026
20 replies
233 views

All of a sudden my Sonos will no longer play WMA files from my WD NAS Drive.

I can navigate to the folder/track etc.

Song starts, i get approx 1 second audio and then nothing, track still shows as still playing.

Leave it running i get sporadic audio for about a second every now and then.

There is no changes to NAS, Router in terms of setup / config. Rebooted both, still the same.

Have updated teh music library several times.

Its the same fro all speakers, play 1, One, Roam, 300 etc.

System quite happy to play FLAC Files, no change there.

Any ideas, greatly appreciated.

Best answer by Corry P

Hi @richardbsimpson

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

I’m sorry to hear of this issue you are having with playing WMA files on your Sonos system.

This is a known issue which we are investigating, though we have no estimate for when a fix might be available. Please cease troubleshooting, as you will not be able to address this yourself.

The only known workaround is to convert the WMA files to another format.

I hope this helps.

Show previous replies

Corry P

Sonos Staff

Hi @Airgetlam

I’ll continue to follow this, since I’m still not sure I understand why it plays fine on a local share, and not on a NAS share.

Um, NAS shares are local shares (although maybe some proprietary software such as WD Cloud is different, but I don’t think that is supported anymore anyway), and WMA files won’t play on Music Libraries, period (or if they do, only for a second, as described above).

I hope this helps.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein

MoPac

Headliner III

I stopped using Windows Media Player many years ago, but for reasons that have nothing to do with WMA. When i dis rip with Windows Media Player i set it to rip in WAV. I don't trust proprietary codecs.

Maybe go through the process of converting the WMA files to FLAC.

Corry P

Sonos Staff

Hi @MoPac

Converting any lossy format to a lossless format (like FLAC) is a waste of storage space. MP3 or AAC would be better options.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein

Stanley_4

Grand Maestro

I'm really happy with FLAC, and the compression (losless) saves a bit of space and bandwidth.

MoPac

Headliner III

Hi @MoPac

Converting any lossy format to a lossless format (like FLAC) is a waste of storage space. MP3 or AAC would be better options.

I'm not that familiar with WMA. Is it always lossless? With Windows Media Player, which I’ll never use again, I always ripped in WAV.

Stanley_4

Grand Maestro

Converting lossy to losless is a waste of space but it doesn't further reduce the quality as you would by converting to another lossy format.

Always best to start out CD quality lossless and then convert to other formats. My collection is FLAC but tne Honda has limited space so it got an MP3 conversion.

buzz

Overall, the web comments claim that WMA files are becoming obsolete and can result in issues when attempting to deal with them. Some WMA files are lossless, others are not.

I’m not a FOOBAR2000 or WMA file user, but various websites indicate that FOOBAR2000 can show which WMA file format has been used. While you could mass convert all WMA files to FLAC, I think a better strategy would be to convert only the lossless files into FLAC and the others into a compatible lossy format. I suppose this could be a bit tedious and messy, but it is a one time task. Make sure that you have appropriate backups.

R

richardbsimpsonAuthor

Contributor I

Thanks for the update Corry P, will wait for any further update.

Corry P

Sonos Staff

Hi @MoPac

I'm not that familiar with WMA. Is it always lossless? With Windows Media Player, which I’ll never use again, I always ripped in WAV.

No - it is usually lossy, but there exists a proprietary version (with the same file extension, maddingly) which is lossless. As WMA stems from a time before huge, inexpensive storage capacities, however, it is unlikely that anyone will encounter lossless WMA files unless they created them themselves.

Weirdly, WAV is just a container - it can contain MP3-compressed audio, which is also somewhat confusing. Similar to how MKV can contain x264 or x265 video, DTS or AC3 audio (and others). So, there’s no guarantee that a WAV file is uncompressed.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein

MoPac

Headliner III

Hi @MoPac

I'm not that familiar with WMA. Is it always lossless? With Windows Media Player, which I’ll never use again, I always ripped in WAV.

No - it is usually lossy, but there exists a proprietary version (with the same file extension, maddingly) which is lossless. As WMA stems from a time before huge, inexpensive storage capacities, however, it is unlikely that anyone will encounter lossless WMA files unless they created them themselves.

Weirdly, WAV is just a container - it can contain MP3-compressed audio, which is also somewhat confusing. Similar to how MKV can contain x264 or x265 video, DTS or AC3 audio (and others). So, there’s no guarantee that a WAV file is uncompressed.

I ripped WAV uncompressed. The reason I gave up on Windows Media Player was the hidden, tiny jpg album art files that when displayed in iPeng (SqueezeBox) looked like crap. Moved on to JRiver & DbPoweramp.

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