Convert audio
Between the formats a phone records and a program will open.
- Convert an audio fileRead almost any audio or video file and write the format you need.
- Compress an audio fileGet a recording under a size limit that is refusing it.
- Convert FLAC to MP3Take a lossless library somewhere that will not play it.
- Convert M4A to MP3Turn an Apple recording into the format everything else plays.
- Convert M4A to WAVGet an Apple recording into the format editors and transcribers ask for.
- Convert MP3 to WAVDecode an MP3 into the uncompressed form editors and samplers expect.
- Convert MP4 to MP3Keep the sound from a video and throw the picture away.
- Convert WAV to MP3Shrink a recording from tens of megabytes to a few.
About these tools
Audio formats fall into two kinds, and most of the confusion comes from mixing them up. Lossless formats such as WAV and FLAC keep every sample the recording captured. Lossy formats such as MP3, AAC and Opus discard detail a listener is unlikely to notice, then store what remains in a fraction of the space. Converting within one kind is safe. Converting from lossy to lossless produces a large file holding exactly what the small one held, and nothing more.
The reason to convert is almost never the format. It is a program that will not open what you have: an editor that rejects M4A, a car stereo from 2009 that reads MP3 and nothing else, a transcription service whose upload form asks for WAV. Each page here names the collision it solves rather than listing every pair that could be produced.
All of it runs on your machine, through the same audio decoders the browser already uses to play a file, so a three-minute track finishes in a second or two and none of it is uploaded. Re-encoding from one lossy format to another compounds the loss each time, so where a page can copy the audio through untouched instead of encoding it again, that is what it does.