Upload a WAV file and get a AAC back. No signup, no watermark, no limit on how many.
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.
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.
This writes a bare AAC stream: the encoded frames on their own, with no container wrapped around them. What surprises people is how much of your WAV that stream still carries. A 96 kHz session export stays at 96 kHz, and a 5.1 mix comes out with all six channels intact — neither of which survives a trip through MP3, which caps out at 48 kHz and folds surround down to stereo. What the stream does not carry is anything about the file: no duration, no seek table, no tags, no artwork.
Only pick this if something downstream specifically wants an ADTS stream, which in practice means broadcast and streaming tooling: HLS segmenters, encoders that concatenate raw frames, hardware that reads a stream off a wire. For anything a person will open, convert to M4A instead. It is the same AAC audio in a container that reports its length, seeks properly and keeps the artist and title — and this conversion keeps none of those, which matters more than it sounds when the file is going into a library rather than a pipeline.
Yes, entirely, and there is no cap on how many files you convert. No account, no watermark, no trial.
Yes, as with any lossy target, and here Best is a flat 192 kbps rather than a variable setting — the encoder is given a number and holds to it, dense passage or silence. From a lossless source that is generous for stereo music and more than generous for speech. If you need a different rate, pick one from the list; unlike the MP3 page, there is no variable option that will make the decision for you.
About a twelfth of the WAV at 192 kbps, and unusually predictable: because the rate is fixed rather than variable, the size follows from the duration alone. Four minutes of stereo is close to 5.5 MB whatever the music does. A raw stream also carries no container overhead at all, so it comes out marginally smaller than an M4A of exactly the same audio — and that missing overhead is the tags and the index you are not getting.
Yes — AAC is one of the formats this converter writes, so the reverse page exists at /aac-to-wav/. Be clear about what comes back, though: the WAV you get is a faithful copy of the AAC, not of the original. The loss happened on the way out, and returning to a lossless format stops further loss rather than undoing it. Keep the original WAV if you still have 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.