Convert M4A to MP3

M4A is what an iPhone's voice memos, iTunes rips and a lot of recorder apps produce — AAC audio in an MP4 box. It is a perfectly good format that half the world's players, car stereos and upload forms still refuse. MP3 is the format nothing refuses, and your browser can do the conversion without the file going anywhere.

  1. Your recordings

    Drop your M4A files here

    M4AMP3WAV

    Your files are never uploaded.

  2. What you want back

  3. Your files

How to convert M4A to MP3

  1. Add your M4A files

    Voice memos, rips, recordings. They are decoded by your browser and never uploaded.

  2. Leave it on MP3

    320 kbps. WAV is there too if the audio is headed into an editor.

  3. Save the MP3s

    Each file alone, or everything as a zip.

What you get

Files that open in things older than the format

MP3 has been universal since the nineties. The car stereo with the USB port, the court's evidence portal, the transcription service's upload form, your uncle's laptop — the M4A that at least one of them refuses becomes a file none of them can.

Voice memos by the folder

A phone's worth of recordings converts in one pass, every file keeping its name. Interviews, lectures, rehearsals — drop the lot and take the zip.

The smallest honest loss

AAC to MP3 is a re-encode, and the page does not pretend otherwise. Encoding at 320 kbps keeps the loss as small as MP3 allows — for speech it is inaudible, for music very close to it. The WAV option skips the second lossy step entirely.

Recordings are never uploaded

Voice memos are some of the most private files a phone holds. This page decodes them where they are; there is no server, no queue and no copy anywhere else.

Questions about M4A

Will converting lose quality?
A little, in principle: AAC and MP3 are both lossy, so this is a second generation of compression, kept as gentle as possible by encoding at 320 kbps. For voice memos and spoken recordings the difference is not audible. For music you care about, convert to WAV instead — bigger, but nothing further is discarded.
Is M4A the same as AAC? And what about M4P?
M4A is AAC audio in an MP4-family container, so yes for practical purposes. M4P is the protected version from the old iTunes store — it is encrypted, and no browser page can or should decode it. If a file fails with a read error and came from a store, that is likely why.
Why do so many things still refuse M4A?
Licensing history and inertia. MP3's patents lapsed and every device made in twenty-five years plays it; AAC support arrived later and less evenly, especially in cars, embedded gear and conservative upload forms. Refusing M4A is rarely a technical judgment — which does not make it less annoying.
Do my recordings' names and order survive?
Names, yes — each MP3 is named after its M4A. Order is your file manager's business, and the zip keeps the names so nothing shuffles. Tags mostly travel too, though artwork can be dropped in the conversion.
Is it free, and is my file uploaded?
Free, no account, no limit. Everything happens in your browser. Your files are never uploaded.

Need the words rather than the sound? The transcriber turns recordings into text, on this same no-upload model. Cleaning up a noisy recording first? Remove the background noise. Or see all the audio tools.