Most people don’t seem to know that Microsoft provides a free utility for converting mp3 files to wma. I recently received a request for a website that needed audio to be played when a user browsed to the site. Given that the audio file was quite large it had to be streamed to the browser and this being one the areas that Microsoft excels in I ran the Microsoft Encoder utility (which I’ve blogged about earlier) and converted the mp3 file to wma in preparation for streaming.

One problem that I didn’t have time to look into was that the original mp3 was around 3MB while the resulting wma file optimized for streaming was 18MB, I’m guessing this is because it was optimized for streaming and contains additional info.

I then found an article on MSDN that shows you how to play media files in the browser and viola had the streaming audio all set up.