Convert VOC to WMA — Free Online Tool
Convert VOC audio files — the raw PCM format used by Creative Labs Sound Blaster cards in DOS-era games — into WMA files encoded with the wmav2 codec, making retro game audio compatible with modern Windows media players and streaming workflows. This conversion re-encodes the uncompressed 8-bit or 16-bit PCM data from the VOC container into Microsoft's lossy WMA format at 128kbps by default.
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FFmpeg Command
Copy this command to run the same conversion locally with FFmpeg on your desktop. Download FFmpeg
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Note: Browser-based encoding uses approximate quality targets. For precise CRF compression, copy the FFmpeg command above and run it on your desktop.
Estimated output:
Conversion Complete!
DownloadHow It Works
VOC files store raw, uncompressed PCM audio (typically 8-bit unsigned or 16-bit signed little-endian) in a simple chunked container designed for DOS-era Sound Blaster hardware. During this conversion, FFmpeg reads the raw PCM stream from the VOC container and re-encodes it using the wmav2 codec — the second-generation Windows Media Audio codec — and wraps the result in an ASF (Advanced Systems Format) container with a .wma extension. Because VOC audio is uncompressed and WMA is a lossy format, this is a true transcoding operation: audio data is decoded from raw PCM and then compressed using WMA's psychoacoustic model, which discards audio information deemed imperceptible to reduce file size. The default 128kbps bitrate is applied during this process.
What Each Flag Does
| Flag | What it does |
|---|---|
ffmpeg
|
Invokes the FFmpeg program, the open-source multimedia processing engine that handles decoding the VOC container and re-encoding its audio to WMA format. |
-i input.voc
|
Specifies the input file: a VOC audio file from the Creative Labs Sound Blaster format. FFmpeg detects the VOC container and reads its raw PCM audio stream (either 8-bit unsigned or 16-bit signed little-endian) for decoding. |
-c:a wmav2
|
Selects wmav2 (Windows Media Audio v2) as the audio encoder, which is the standard and more advanced of the two WMA codecs supported — preferable over wmav1 for better audio quality at the same bitrate. |
-b:a 128k
|
Sets the target audio bitrate to 128 kilobits per second for the wmav2 encoder. This is the default WMA quality level, suitable for most VOC sources; increase to 192k or 256k for 16-bit VOC files where preserving dynamic range is important. |
output.wma
|
Defines the output filename and triggers FFmpeg to wrap the wmav2-encoded audio in an ASF container with the .wma extension, which is the standard Windows Media Audio file format recognized by Windows and compatible media players. |
Common Use Cases
- Extracting sound effects and music from DOS game VOC files to use in modern game remakes or fan projects that target Windows platforms where WMA is natively supported
- Converting a collection of Sound Blaster VOC recordings — such as digitized speech or early PC game samples — into a smaller, more manageable format for Windows Media Player or Xbox media libraries
- Archiving retro multimedia CD-ROM content that stored audio in VOC format into a modern compressed format for long-term digital storage without the large file sizes of raw PCM
- Preparing vintage PC game audio assets for use in Windows-based video editing timelines where WMA is a supported import format and file size must be kept low
- Converting VOC audio from demoscene productions or early 1990s shareware games into WMA for sharing or streaming on platforms that accept the ASF/WMA container
- Batch-converting a Sound Blaster audio sample library from VOC to WMA to reduce disk footprint while keeping the files playable on Windows without third-party codecs
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes — this conversion is lossy. VOC stores raw, uncompressed PCM audio (either 8-bit unsigned or 16-bit signed), so the source is already at its original recorded quality with no compression artifacts. The wmav2 encoder at 128kbps introduces psychoacoustic compression, discarding audio data the encoder deems inaudible. For 8-bit VOC files, which already have a relatively limited dynamic range, the quality difference at 128kbps is usually not significant. For 16-bit VOC content, you may prefer to use 192kbps or higher to better preserve the wider dynamic range.
Yes. WMA using the wmav2 codec is a native Microsoft format with built-in support in Windows Media Player, Windows 10/11 Media Player, Groove Music, and the broader Windows codec stack. Files converted from VOC to WMA with this tool will play without requiring any additional codec installation on Windows systems. Most modern smart TVs and Xbox consoles also support WMA playback natively.
Change the value after the -b:a flag in the command. For example, replace '128k' with '192k' for higher quality (recommended for 16-bit VOC sources) or '64k' for a smaller file size. The full command with 192kbps would be: ffmpeg -i input.voc -c:a wmav2 -b:a 192k output.wma. Supported bitrates for wmav2 include 64k, 96k, 128k, 160k, 192k, 256k, and 320k.
No. The VOC format is a very primitive audio container with no support for metadata tags — it was designed purely for raw audio playback on Sound Blaster hardware. The WMA/ASF container does support rich metadata (artist, title, album, etc.), but since the source VOC file contains no such information, the output WMA file will not have any tags populated automatically. You would need to add tags manually after conversion using a tag editor.
FFmpeg handles both 8-bit unsigned (pcm_u8) and 16-bit signed little-endian (pcm_s16le) PCM from VOC files automatically. If your VOC uses 8-bit audio, the output WMA will reflect that original limited fidelity — the wmav2 encoder cannot recover dynamic range that wasn't present in the source. The conversion will succeed either way, but 8-bit sources will sound noticeably lo-fi in the output, which is characteristic of authentic Sound Blaster-era audio.
The single-file command shown is easily adapted for batch processing on your desktop. On Windows, you can run: for %f in (*.voc) do ffmpeg -i "%f" -c:a wmav2 -b:a 128k "%~nf.wma" in Command Prompt to convert every VOC file in a folder. On Linux or macOS, use: for f in *.voc; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -c:a wmav2 -b:a 128k "${f%.voc}.wma"; done. The browser-based tool processes one file at a time, so the desktop FFmpeg command is the recommended approach for large VOC libraries.
Technical Notes
VOC is one of the earliest digital audio container formats, developed by Creative Labs circa 1989 for the Sound Blaster ISA card. Its chunked structure supports PCM data in either 8-bit unsigned or 16-bit signed little-endian encoding, with no psychoacoustic compression, no metadata support, and no multi-track capability. WMA (Windows Media Audio) uses the ASF container and the wmav2 codec — a significant improvement over the original wmav1 — and applies frequency-domain lossy compression similar in approach to MP3 and AAC, though with different psychoacoustic modeling tuned by Microsoft. One important consideration: VOC files from DOS games were often sampled at non-standard rates such as 11025 Hz or 22050 Hz rather than the CD-standard 44100 Hz; FFmpeg will preserve the original sample rate in the WMA output by default, which means some WMA players may play these files at an unexpected pitch or quality level. If you need 44100 Hz output, add -ar 44100 to the command. WMA does not support DRM in files produced by FFmpeg — the DRM capability in the WMA spec requires Microsoft's proprietary licensing infrastructure, so converted files will be fully unrestricted. File sizes will typically be 10–20x smaller than the source VOC depending on its duration and bitrate selection.