Why do people use WMA? How does it compare to other codecs? etc., [split from “Windows Media Player 12 VBR Codec?”, thread 99192] Options

[eahm]

Pardon my ignorance and please, this is a real question: why people use WMA? I've hear many people using it and I didn't used once.

[Porcus]

I guess that WMA was part of Microsoft's futile attempt at becoming what the fruitcake company is today.

One should have in mind what was going on back then. The press was writing about how Fraunhofer was about to pull the "first needle free and then you're hooked" trick and cash in on MP3. It didn't turn out that way, and it might not have been so much of a real threat as the press would have it, but
- it might have been a strategy against being vulnerable to royalty claims.
- it was anyway at a time when Microsoft was really building their own of everything, whether they screwed over any and every standard or just had their own format
- Microsoft was in the market for portable playback devices
- and, not to forget: Microsoft was going for DRM big time, and needed a format which in the very least offered that @£¤%& stuff. Microsoft was positioning themselves at the monopoly on locking digital music into the computer in a way that the consumers couldn't get their hands on it.

Luckily the DRM bandwagon flopped (throwing out the reason to launch the OS that later became the quite pointless Vista), and there is simply no use for the WMA formats anymore. Honestly, what is there to it? Except it isn't as bad as Real Audio?