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How to Convert M4A to WAV
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When Do You Need to Convert M4A to WAV?
You need audio from an M4A in a form an editor, a transcription tool or a game engine will accept without argument. Converting M4A to WAV produces plain uncompressed audio, which is what software that refuses compressed formats is asking for.
What Happens When You Convert M4A to WAV
ffmpeg decodes the M4A and writes uncompressed PCM in a WAV container. The decode itself is exact, so nothing further is lost, but it does not recover anything the original already discarded: an M4A holding AAC was compressed when it was made, and that loss is permanent. An M4A holding Apple Lossless decodes to exactly the original audio. Expect the file to grow substantially, since WAV stores every sample in full, around 10 MB per minute for CD quality stereo.
Worth knowing before you convert
An hour of stereo audio lands near 600 MB as WAV. Convert only what the software actually needs rather than a whole library.
About M4A and WAV
audio/alac
ALAC is an audio coding format developed by Apple Inc. for lossless data compression of digital music. It allows audio data to be compressed without losing any information, unlike MP3 or AAC.
audio/wav
WAV is an uncompressed audio format that stores raw PCM audio data. It delivers perfect audio quality but results in very large file sizes. WAV is commonly used in professional audio recording, editing, and archival workflows.
Conversion Notes
Audio conversion from M4A to WAV re-encodes at the highest quality setting appropriate for the target format. Lossless-to-lossy conversion (e.g., FLAC to MP3) is a one-way process — converting back to lossless does not recover the discarded information. Metadata tags (title, artist, album, track number) are mapped to the closest equivalent fields in the target format.
Frequently Asked Questions
The conversion step is. Whether the audio is a faithful original depends on the source: AAC inside the M4A was already lossy, Apple Lossless was not.