WMA to SPH Converter

Produce SPHERE speech research audio from WMA

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Speech Corpus Format

SPH is standard for speech datasets — convert WMA for research use.

Dataset Preparation

Process entire WMA collections to SPH simultaneously.

Online Conversion

No speech toolkit needed — convert WMA to SPH in your browser.

How to convert WMA to SPH

1

Select files from Computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, URL or by dragging it on the page.

2

Choose sph or any other format you need as a result (more than 200 formats supported)

3

Let the file convert and you can download your sph file right afterwards

About formats

WMA (Windows Media Audio) is a family of proprietary audio codecs developed by Microsoft and first released in 1999 as part of the Windows Media framework. Created to compete with MP3 and AAC, WMA Standard uses perceptual coding to deliver what Microsoft claimed was near-CD quality at bitrates as low as 64 kbps — roughly half the data rate MP3 typically needed for comparable results. The codec family grew to include WMA Professional for surround sound and high-resolution audio, WMA Lossless for bit-perfect archival compression, and WMA Voice optimized for spoken content at very low bitrates. Deep integration with Windows, Windows Media Player, and the Zune ecosystem gave WMA a strong distribution advantage throughout the 2000s, and digital rights management (DRM) support made it attractive to online music stores of that era. Encoding and decoding are handled natively by Windows, requiring no third-party software for playback on any Windows machine. Cross-platform support has improved through libraries like FFmpeg and GStreamer, though WMA remains less universally compatible than MP3 or AAC on non-Microsoft devices. The format still appears in legacy media libraries, though newer codecs have largely taken its place for streaming and portable use.
Initial release: 1999
SPH is the file extension for audio stored in the NIST SPHERE (SPeech HEader REsources) format, a standard created by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology around 1990. Built for speech research, SPH files carry a 1024-byte ASCII header packed with metadata — database identifiers, channel counts, sample rates, byte ordering, and compression type — making every recording self-describing. The underlying audio is typically 16-bit linear PCM sampled at 16 kHz, though other configurations are permitted. Researchers at NIST, DARPA, and universities worldwide rely on SPH for distributing speech corpora such as TIMIT, Switchboard, and the LDC collections that underpin modern automatic speech recognition systems. A key advantage is that the human-readable header lets scripts parse recording metadata without binary decoding. The format's strict standardization also eliminates ambiguity when sharing datasets across institutions and platforms. Because SPH files store uncompressed PCM, they preserve full audio fidelity — critical when training acoustic models where even small artifacts can skew results.
Initial release: 1990

Frequently Asked Questions

Why convert WMA to SPH?

SPH (SPHERE) is the NIST standard for speech research corpora. Automatic speech recognition toolkits like Kaldi and HTK cannot import WMA — they require SPHERE-formatted input.

Which tools and research platforms work with SPH files?

Kaldi, HTK, CMU Sphinx, NIST scoring tools, and most academic speech recognition frameworks expect SPH. It is the de facto standard for distributing speech evaluation datasets.

Are SPH and NIST the same format?

Yes — both names refer to the SPHERE format defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. SPH is the common file extension used across speech research communities.

Will my WMA recordings retain enough quality in SPH?

SPHERE supports various sample rates and bit depths. The conversion preserves the audio fidelity present in your WMA files, which is typically sufficient for speech recognition tasks.

Can I convert a large WMA speech dataset to SPH at once?

Yes — upload your full collection of WMA speech recordings and convertio.tools produces individual SPH files for each, which is ideal for preparing research corpora efficiently.