AAC to MP3

What this does

AAC is MP3’s successor and the default across Apple devices, YouTube, broadcast radio and most streaming. It is better than MP3 at the same bitrate. It is also the one that occasionally will not load — in older car stereos, on cheap players, and in software that was written around MP3 and never updated.

AAC is the default for Apple devices and a lot of broadcast audio.

Converting down to the format that always works

This conversion trades a small amount of quality for compatibility, and that is the honest description of it. Both formats are lossy, so the second pass loses a little of what the first pass left; at 192 kbps or above the difference is not something ordinary playback reveals. A bare .aac file and an AAC track inside an .m4a are the same audio in different wrappers, and both are handled here.

Nothing is uploaded

The conversion happens inside this page. Your file is read by the browser, converted here, and saved straight back to your downloads. It is never sent to a server, so there is no upload wait and no size cap beyond what your own device can hold.

Open your browser’s developer tools, switch to the network panel, and convert a file. You will see the converter itself download once, and no upload of your audio at all. That is the whole difference between this and a site that converts on a server, and what that difference actually means is worth a read.

The first conversion is slower

The converter is about 32 MB and downloads the first time you use it, which is the one moment this page is not instant. After that it is cached, and later conversions start immediately, even offline. So do later visits.

Questions