Upload a AAC file and get a WAV back. No signup, no watermark, no limit on how many.
AAC is MP3's designated successor and wins at low bitrates by a clear margin. A bare .aac file is the raw ADTS stream rather than the .m4a container most software expects.
Where you run into it: YouTube and streaming audio tracks, broadcast, anything that came out of a device rather than a music shop.
What it costs you: The naked .aac extension confuses a surprising amount of software, which is the usual reason people convert it.
WAV is raw, uncompressed PCM in a Microsoft container: the audio exactly as it was sampled, with nothing clever done to it.
Where you run into it: Recording sessions, sample libraries, video editors, anything that has to be edited rather than merely listened to.
What it costs you: It is enormous — roughly 10 MB a minute in CD-quality stereo — and it carries almost no tagging, so a folder of WAVs is a folder of filenames.
A bare .aac has no file-level header at all — it is a run of frames, which is why players list it with an unknown length and then refuse to scrub. Decoding it to WAV is what finally gives the audio a header that states its own length, sample rate and channel count, and that alone settles most complaints about these files. One side effect is measurable: the WAV starts about 23 milliseconds late. A raw stream carries no metadata telling the decoder how much of the encoder's own priming to discard, so roughly a thousand samples of near-silence arrive at the front.
Nearly every bare .aac comes from a capture: a radio stream saved by a recorder, an HLS segment pulled out of a player, a broadcast tool's export, a dashcam. WAV is the right destination when the file is going straight into an editor, a transcription tool or a phone system, all of which want PCM and none of which enjoy raw AAC. It is the wrong destination for keeping the file: a WAV of a capture is ten times the size and no better, and it discards the one advantage the stream still had — being the original bytes.
Yes, entirely, and there is no cap on how many files you convert. No account, no watermark, no trial.
Nothing further is lost and nothing returns. What matters on this pair is provenance: a captured stream is usually the only copy in existence, with no better original to go back to, so if you are going to decode it, decode it once and keep what you get. The 23 milliseconds of priming silence at the start is the only thing the conversion actually adds, and trimming it is a two-second job in any editor.
Genuinely hard to predict before you convert, which is itself characteristic of the format: a bare stream does not declare its duration, so nothing can tell you the WAV's size in advance. Once it is decoded you are back to ordinary PCM arithmetic — about 10 MB a minute at 44.1 kHz stereo, and half that for the mono speech captures these files often turn out to be.
Yes — WAV is one of the formats this converter writes, so the reverse page exists at /wav-to-aac/. The trip out is exact, because WAV discards nothing — it is the return to AAC that re-encodes. A round trip therefore costs one more generation rather than two, and the WAV in the middle was never an improvement on the AAC you started with.
The file is uploaded to do the conversion — nothing here runs in your browser — and both your upload and the converted result are deleted the moment the file is sent back. Nothing is stored and nothing is logged beyond the request itself.