WAV → M4A

Some, and it is permanent — this is the one direction where information is genuinely thrown away. WAV holds every sample exactly; M4A discards what a psychoacoustic model predicts you will not hear. At 192 kbps and above that prediction is good enough to be transparent on most material and most equipment. Keep the WAV as your master, because you cannot get back to it from the M4A. WAV normally stores raw uncompressed PCM — every sample kept exactly, at whatever bit depth and sample rate was captured. An M4A holds AAC in most cases, or Apple Lossless (ALAC) when it came from a lossless rip.

Yes, and it is a genuine gain over WAV, which has nowhere dependable to store any of it. M4A carries title, artist, album, year, track number and embedded cover art in the container itself, so a music library files it correctly without a manual pass. M4A keeps rich iTunes-style metadata, chapters and artwork intact, and is the native audio format across every Apple device.

If WAV is lossy and M4A is lossless (e.g. MP3 → WAV), the M4A is no better than the WAV — you cannot recover information already discarded. If WAV is lossless and M4A is lossy, the M4A codec recompresses; at 192 kbps the result is transparent for most content.

Several files in one job need a paid plan. Free use is one file per conversion, one conversion an hour. On a paid plan you can add several files to one job, then download each result on its own or all of them in one ZIP.

By default yes — 48 kHz WAV stays 48 kHz in M4A. If you need to downsample for compatibility (96 kHz → 44.1 kHz for CD burning), the sample-rate option applies high-quality resampling in the same encode pass.

Not in this step. The converter has no loudness setting and leaves the level as it is. To even out the volume, run the finished M4A through a Normalize tool on this site.

MP3 plays almost everywhere. AAC plays on Apple devices, most Android phones and Sonos. FLAC plays on Sonos and Android but not on older iPods, and WAV plays on nearly everything but makes large files. There are no device presets on this page, so choose the target format your player supports. M4A hides two very different things behind one extension — lossy AAC and lossless ALAC — and non-Apple hardware support is inconsistent.

Yes. Uploaded WAV files are processed on our own conversion servers, no person reviews them, and they are never shared. The upload and the converted M4A are both deleted automatically about 24 hours after the conversion, which leaves time to download the result. See /privacy/ for the full policy.

It depends on the size and length of the file. Small documents and images are usually ready quickly. Long videos take the longest, because most video conversions re-encode every frame.