WAV to FLAC

What this does

FLAC makes a WAV smaller without changing a single sample. Typically it lands at 50–60% of the original, and decoding it returns the recording exactly as it was. If you are keeping audio rather than sending it, this is the conversion to make — and it is the one you can undo.

WAV stores every sample uncompressed, which is why a few minutes of it can run to tens of megabytes. Nothing about that size is carrying extra information.

Half the size, none of the loss

FLAC compresses the way a zip file does: by finding structure and describing it more briefly, never by deciding some of the audio is inaudible. That is what separates it from MP3 and from Vorbis. A 30 MB WAV commonly becomes a 17 MB FLAC holding the identical recording, and converting it back produces a WAV with the same samples the original had. It is the right format for an archive, for a master, and for anything you might want to re-encode differently in five years — because a future MP3, or whatever replaces it, can be made from the FLAC rather than from a compressed copy.

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