Audio Converter Online
Audio formats split the same way images do — MP3, AAC and Opus discard sound the ear barely notices to shrink the file, while WAV and FLAC keep the waveform exactly — and picking between them depends on what you are actually doing with the file.
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Format reference
About this converter
MP3, AAC and Opus are lossy: a psychoacoustic model predicts what a listener will not consciously hear — quiet sounds masked by louder ones, frequencies at the edges of hearing — and discards it before compressing what remains. WAV and FLAC are lossless in two different ways: WAV stores the raw waveform uncompressed, exactly as recorded, while FLAC compresses the same waveform losslessly, typically to 50-60% of the WAV size, and decompresses back to bit-identical audio.
Bitrate and sample rate measure different things and both matter. Bitrate is how much data a lossy codec spends per second — 128 kbps for casual listening, 320 kbps for music you want to keep — and higher always means larger and closer to the original. Sample rate is how many times per second the waveform was measured when recorded, 44.1 kHz for CD-quality audio and 48 kHz for video; converting between formats should preserve the original sample rate rather than resampling, which is a separate, generally unnecessary step.
The most common practical task is not converting music but extracting audio from something else: pulling the soundtrack out of a downloaded video, converting a batch of voice memos to a format a transcription tool accepts, or turning a lossless studio recording into a small MP3 for casual sharing while keeping the FLAC master untouched.
Frequently asked questions
- Which audio format should I use to keep the best quality?
- WAV or FLAC. Both are lossless — WAV stores the raw waveform uncompressed, FLAC compresses it losslessly to roughly half the size — so no audio information is discarded either way. Use MP3 or AAC only when file size matters more than absolute fidelity.
- What bitrate should I choose for MP3?
- 320 kbps for music you want to keep long-term, 192 kbps as a solid balance of size and quality for everyday listening, 128 kbps only for speech or podcasts where file size matters most. Above 320 kbps, MP3 itself becomes the limiting factor rather than the bitrate.
- Does converting WAV to MP3 lose quality permanently?
- Yes — MP3 compression discards audio detail that cannot be recovered by converting back. If you might need the original quality again, keep the WAV or FLAC source and export MP3 copies for sharing, rather than deleting the lossless original after converting.
- Can I extract audio from a video file?
- Yes — upload the video and choose an audio format as the output; only the soundtrack is converted and the video stream is discarded entirely. This is the standard way to save a podcast, lecture or music track from a downloaded video file.
- What is the difference between bitrate and sample rate?
- Bitrate is how much data a lossy codec spends per second of audio, controlling file size and quality. Sample rate is how many times per second the original waveform was measured during recording — 44.1 kHz and 48 kHz are the common values — and it should generally be preserved rather than changed during conversion.
- Why does my converted audio file sound different from the original?
- If you converted between two lossy formats, such as AAC to MP3, you re-encoded already-compressed audio and added a second round of loss on top of the first. Converting from a lossless source like WAV or FLAC avoids this entirely, since nothing was discarded before the lossy encode.