Convert M4A to MP3 - online and free
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How to convert a M4A to a MP3 file?
- Choose the M4A file that you want to convert.
- Select MP3 as the the format you want to convert your M4A file to.
- Click "Convert" to convert your M4A file.
Zamzar Pro Tip: The default player for M4A files is through Apple iTunes, however you can also use Quicktime.
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M4A (Audio)
| File extension | .m4a |
| Category | Audio File |
| Description | M4A audio files were developed to enable easy sharing of digital music, audiobook content, podcasts. It was generally intended as the successor to MP3 and the file quality is better and file sizes smaller compared to MP3 files. M4A files sound better than MP3 files when encoded at the same bit rate due to some of the enhancements. It's the default audio format for Apple products, Nintendo products, Android, Blackberry, PlayStation, and many in-dash music systems in cars. |
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| Technical Details | M4A is a file encoded with advanced audio coding (AAC) and is implemented with AAC compression standards or ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) specifications. This effectively means that they can be decoded back to their original quality they were at the point of compression. It was developed by Apple and it only contains audio data, rather than MP4 which contains both audio and video. An added benefit of M4A files are that they do not carry any Digital Rights Management protection. |
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| Developed by | Apple |
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MP3 (Audio)
| File extension | .mp3 |
| Category | Audio File |
| Description | MP3 is a digital music format which allows CD tracks to be reduced to around a tenth of their normal size without a significant loss of quality. MP3 gets rid of a lot of the information recorded in a song that our ears are not able to hear and then uses complex algorithms to reduce the file size. This then enables you to get hundreds of songs on to a CD and it also has opened up a new market over the internet - the download market as download times have been significantly reduced. |
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| Technical Details | The MP3 format is a lossy format. That means that an MP3 file does not contain 100% of the original audio information. Instead, MP3 files use perceptual coding. In other words, that means it removes the information that your ear doesn't notice thereby making the file smaller. The reason lossy formats are used over RAW is that RAW audio files are too large to travel over the internet at any great speed. By using lossy formats it enables even dial up users to download mp3 files at a reasonable speed. RAW file formats generally require 176,000 bytes per second compared to a lossy format which requires 17,600. The difference is massive and so are the download times. |
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| Developed by | Moving Picture Experts Group |
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Convert M4A file
Using Zamzar it is possible to convert M4A files to a variety of other formats
- m4a to aac (Advanced Audio Coding File)
- m4a to ac3 (AC3 Audio File)
- m4a to flac (Free Lossless Audio Codec)
- m4a to m4r (iPhone Ringtone File)
- m4a to mp3 (Compressed audio file)
- m4a to mp4 (MPEG-4 Video File)
- m4a to ogg (Ogg Vorbis Compressed Audio File)
- m4a to wav (Windows audio file)
- m4a to wma (Windows Media Audio)