Upload a AIFF file and get a MP3 back. No signup, no watermark, no limit on how many.
AIFF is Apple's uncompressed PCM format — WAV's opposite number, same audio, different byte order and a container that handles tags rather better.
Where you run into it: Logic and Pro Tools sessions, Mac recordings, older Apple software that wrote it by default.
What it costs you: As big as WAV, and outside the Mac world rather less widely accepted.
MP3 is the format that made portable music work, and thirty years on it is still the one every device, car stereo, DAW and browser will open without being asked twice.
Where you run into it: Downloads, podcast feeds, old music libraries, anything a client sends you and expects you to just play.
What it costs you: It throws audio away to get small, and at 320 kbps almost nobody can hear what went. What matters is that the discarded part never comes back.
An AIFF is uncompressed PCM, so this is the conversion that finally makes a Mac session export small enough to send. There is one ceiling to know about before you do it: MP3 cannot carry a sample rate above 48 kHz. If your bounce came out of Logic or Pro Tools at 96 kHz — and plenty do — it is resampled down to 48 on the way through, which is a change to the audio over and above what the encoder discards. At 44.1 or 48 kHz nothing is resampled and the rate passes straight through.
This is the demo-and-deliverable step at the end of a Mac session: the rough mix going to a collaborator, the reference file for a client, the version that goes up for streaming. AIFF carries ID3 tags properly and MP3 reads the same tags, so whatever the file already had comes with it. Keep the AIFF — it is what you go back to for a remix, a remaster or simply a louder export, and once the session is archived the AIFF is usually easier to find than the project file.
Yes, entirely, and there is no cap on how many files you convert. No account, no watermark, no trial.
Yes, and possibly twice, depending on what your AIFF actually holds. An ordinary AIFF or an AIFF-C marked sowt is uncompressed, so the MP3 encoder is the only thing that discards anything and Best gives you a result very close to the source. But AIFF-C also permits real compression, and old Mac software wrote IMA4 and µ-law files with the same extension — if that is what you have, the first encoder already did damage and the MP3 is a second generation. A 96 kHz bounce also loses its top octave to the resample.
Around a tenth of the AIFF at Best, which for session exports is the difference between a file you can email and a file you cannot. A four-minute stereo bounce goes from roughly 40 MB to roughly 4 MB. A 96 kHz source shrinks more dramatically still, and part of that is the resample rather than the encoder — worth remembering if the number looks too good.
Not here. AIFF can be read but not written by this converter — ffmpeg decodes it happily, and encoding back to it would mean a format almost nothing plays. If you need the original AIFF, keep it rather than recreating it.
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.