M4A to MP3 converter

Other ways to change this recording

• WAV to MP3 Studio and recorder files down to something you can send.
• FLAC to MP3 Lossless albums onto players and cars that will not read FLAC.
• MP3 to WAV For editors, CD burners and anything that asks for WAV.

Or open the audio converter for any other format, and the audio compressor when the problem is size rather than format.

Where an M4A gets turned away

M4A is Apple’s default for sound. The Voice Memos app saves one, iTunes sold them, and GarageBand on an iPhone shares one unless told otherwise. On Apple devices that never matters. It starts mattering at a car stereo from 2012, a cheap MP3 player, a church sound desk, a podcast host’s upload form or a Windows program that lists “MP3, WAV” and nothing else.

MP3 is the answer people reach for because it is the one format with no exceptions. Anything that plays sound plays it.

What the MP3 keeps from the M4A

• The length and the words are the same. A mono voice memo stays mono, a stereo song stays stereo.
• Title, artist and album tags come across. The album artwork does not — it is dropped on the way, so a song will show a blank square in a music app.
• The size depends on the source. A voice memo usually grows slightly as an MP3, because Voice Memos already writes a lean file. A 256 kbps iTunes song comes out smaller, at 192 kbps.

Two lossy formats, and the cost of crossing between them

An M4A is a box, and the sound inside it is almost always AAC — the same family of compression as MP3, a generation newer. That makes this the one conversion on this site where both sides have already thrown sound away, and it is worth knowing what that costs. Each lossy format discards what its own model of hearing says you will not miss. AAC and MP3 do not agree exactly about what that is, so converting from one to the other discards a little more, and none of it comes back.

This page keeps the cost small in two ways. It writes MP3 at 96 kbps for each channel, which is where the difference stops being audible on speech and is very hard to hear on music. And it never spends more than a quarter above what the M4A was using. Writing a 64 kbps voice memo out at 192 kbps would not make it sound any better; it would just make a file three times the size of the same sound.

Some M4As hold ALAC instead, Apple’s lossless format, used for ripped CDs set to “Apple Lossless”. Those are converted the same way and lose nothing more than any lossless file does going to MP3. What cannot be converted at all is an old iTunes purchase with the .m4p ending: that copy protection is there to stop exactly this, and the page will say it cannot read it.

Turning an M4A into an MP3

1. MP3 is already selected above.
2. Drop your M4A file in, or click to browse.
3. Download the result. It never left your device.

On an iPhone, open Voice Memos, tap the memo, then Share › Save to Files, and pick that file here.

M4A questions that come up