Upload a FLAC file and get a WAV back. No signup, no watermark, no limit on how many.
FLAC compresses losslessly: it typically halves a WAV and gives back bit-for-bit the same audio when decoded. It is free, open, and widely supported outside Apple's world.
Where you run into it: Archived rips, Bandcamp and Qobuz downloads, anyone who keeps a music library they intend to still have in ten years.
What it costs you: Half of enormous is still large, and some hardware — car head units especially — will not touch 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.
Both sides are lossless, so the samples come across unchanged — with one exception worth knowing before you download the result. WAV is written here as 16-bit PCM, so a 16-bit FLAC converts exactly, sample for sample, while a 24-bit FLAC is rounded down to sixteen. The sample rate is untouched either way: a 96 kHz file stays at 96 kHz. Going in this direction keeps the written tags — artist, title and album land in the WAV's INFO chunk — but drops the cover art and the checksum FLAC keeps of its own contents.
The reason to go backwards is a tool or a device that cannot read FLAC, and there are still plenty: older Pro Tools versions, hardware samplers and drum machines, some CD-burning software, a great many car head units, and a fair amount of broadcast and telephony equipment. Be deliberate about it and keep the FLAC. It is the smaller file, it keeps the cover art, and it can prove it has not quietly corrupted, because a FLAC stores a checksum of its own audio — a WAV has no way to tell you that.
Yes, entirely, and there is no cap on how many files you convert. No account, no watermark, no trial.
For a 16-bit FLAC, no: the WAV decodes to exactly the same samples you started with. For a 24-bit one, yes, a little — the depth is reduced to 16 bits, which costs headroom rather than anything you would hear in ordinary listening, but it is a real change and not a repackaging. Check which you have before assuming this is free. Most music FLACs are 16-bit; most files sold as hi-res are not.
Roughly double, since FLAC usually stores a WAV in about half the space. A 24-bit source is the exception and comes out smaller than the arithmetic suggests, because the WAV is holding two bytes per sample where the FLAC was holding three. High sample rates scale all of it up — a 96 kHz album is large in either format, and larger as WAV.
Yes — WAV is one of the formats this converter writes, so the reverse page exists at /wav-to-flac/. Both formats are lossless, so this round trip is exact: decode what comes back and you have the samples you started with, bit for bit. Only the file size changes, which makes this the one pair you can convert back and forth as often as you like.
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.