Drop in a M4A file and get a MP3 back in seconds. Free, no account, and nothing is kept on our server.
Convert audio files between MP3, WAV, FLAC, AAC, OGG, Opus, and more. Extract audio from video. Powered by FFmpeg — free, no installation.
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Supported formats: MP3, WAV, FLAC, AAC, OGG, OPUS, WMA, M4A, AIFF, AC3, AIFF, AMR
Also: MP4, MKV, AVI, MOV (extracts the audio track) · Max 512 MB
Voice memos and iTunes downloads arrive as M4A, and older car stereos, gym equipment and DJ gear still expect MP3.
M4A is not a codec at all but a container, MPEG-4 Part 14, that almost always holds AAC audio (or ALAC if the file came from Apple Lossless). iTunes made it the everyday extension for downloaded music and voice memos, which is why so many people meet it without ever choosing it.
MP3, formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III, was standardised in 1993 after years of work at Fraunhofer IIS. It discards sound the ear is unlikely to notice, which is how a three-minute track fits into a few megabytes instead of thirty. Nothing else comes close to its reach: every phone, browser, car stereo and cheap player made in the last two decades reads it. That universality, not sound quality, is why it is still the safe default today.
| M4A | MP3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Released | 2003 | 1993 |
| Developed by | MPEG / Apple | Fraunhofer IIS / MPEG |
| Compression | lossy | lossy |
| Typical bitrate | 128-256 kbit/s | 128-320 kbit/s |
| Three-minute track | 3-6 MB | 3-7 MB |
| Quality ceiling | Same as its codec | Good, not transparent |
| Best suited to | iTunes and Apple ecosystem | Sharing, phones, car stereos |
| Playback support | Wide, weaker on old car stereos | Universal |
Slightly. Both formats are compressed, so decoding and re-encoding costs a little detail. At 192 kbit/s and above the difference is hard to hear on normal equipment, but converting the same file back and forth repeatedly will audibly degrade it.
A normal song finishes in a few seconds. Conversion runs on our server rather than in your browser, so the slow part is usually the upload, not the work itself. Long recordings such as lectures or podcasts take proportionally longer.
Your file is uploaded to our server because the conversion runs there. A cleanup task runs every hour and deletes anything older than an hour, so nothing you upload survives more than about two hours. We do not open your files, we do not keep copies, and no account is needed to use the converter.