How to Play WAV or Voicemail files on your Windows Mobile Device (Codec Support)

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May companies these days are moving to Unified Communications, and with ease of use and the ability to receive voicemails via e-mail the ask of listening to those voicemails while your away from your desk has become quite popular.

The Issue

This issue has been that you can't listen to these voicemails from time to time on your Windows Mobile Device.  When you try to play the .wav file on the Windows Mobile Device Media Player is unable to play the file.  The problem is not that we don’t support WAV, as a WAV File consists of a header and the audio data. The header contains information such as sampling rate. The audio data itself can be stored in many different formats PCM, u-law and a-law to mention a few.  The issue is that we don’t support some of the popular Codec’s around WAV.  The most popular and most often used for Voicemail are a-law and U-law (the U in U-law is actually a Greek letter Mu) both part of the GSM 7.11 Codec.  Most call managers have the option to change the codec they use for encoding a file but U-law has become very popular due to its compression of voice.  The current lack of support in Windows Mobile 5.0 poses a real issue.

The Current Solution

  1. Use a 3rd party product on your device such as TCMP to listen to your Voicemails.
    https://tcpmp.corecodec.org/
  2. Change the Codec your call manager uses so that you can play Voicemail files on your device.

The question of adding codecs to Media Player often comes up and is a great one, the problem here is that only OEMS can add codecs to Media Player and codecs cannot be added by an end user so if Media Player doesn’t support the codec out of the box you can’t add support after the fact.