Windows Media Audio

Windows Media Audio Professional

Windows Media Audio Professional (WMA Pro) was recently released to address limitations in WMA Standard. It supports multichannel encoding and high resolutions (24bit, high sampling rates)

Since it's backwards incompatible with WMA Std, Microsoft took the opportunity to make a high quality encoder out of it. Meanwhile WMA Std lost even to MP3 in an informal public listening test, WMA Pro was ranked at the top (next to other high quality formats) in a similar test.

These days, Microsoft is pushing the Pro codec for inclusion in the next generation DVD standard as standard audio format.