Audio Tools — Convert Audio to Lossless AIFF/ALAC/WavPack
Audio to AIFF / ALAC / WavPack Converter
AIFF ALAC WavPack Converter - Convert Audio to Lossless AIFF, ALAC or WavPack Online — Turn any common audio file (MP3, WAV, FLAC, OGG, M4A, AAC, WMA and more) into a lossless AIFF, ALAC (Apple Lossless) or WavPack file. AIFF is the classic Apple/audio-CE uncompressed format, ALAC is Apple Lossless in an M4A container, and WavPack is a flexible open-source lossless format. A metadata tag editor is built in: existing tags (title, artist, album, album artist, genre, year, track, comment) are read from the source file automatically, can be edited, and are written into the output while encoding. Everything is processed locally in your browser, with files never uploaded to a server.
Supported input: MP3, WAV, FLAC, OGG, Opus, M4A, AAC, WMA, AIFF and other common audio formats. Everything is converted locally in your browser; files are never uploaded to a server.
First use loads an ~30MB audio processing engine into the current browser. It is cached and reused afterwards, so please be patient.
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Click to select or drag and drop an audio file
Any common audio format; under 500MB recommended
Compression:
AIFF: AIFF stores uncompressed PCM audio in big-endian byte order (the classic Apple format). Identical sound to WAV; widely used in audio production. No extra settings needed.
ALAC: ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) is Apple's open-source lossless codec, saved in an M4A container. Fully supported by iTunes and all Apple devices, and by Android too.
WavPack: WavPack is a flexible open-source lossless format (BSD licensed). Higher compression gives smaller files but slower conversion.
Audio Tags
Fill in any fields below to write metadata tags into the output file (fields left empty are omitted). Existing tags in the input file are read automatically and filled in here after you select a file.
What are AIFF, ALAC and WavPack?
These are the three lossless alternatives to the WAV/FLAC pair. AIFF is uncompressed PCM — the Mac world's counterpart to WAV. ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) is Apple's compressed-lossless codec, stored in an M4A container and natively supported by every Apple device. WavPack is an open-source lossless codec with a trick nobody else has: a hybrid mode that emits a small lossy file plus a correction file, so the same recording can serve both a phone and an archive. All three decode back to bit-identical PCM — lossless means lossless, regardless of vendor.
Five facts to anchor the rest of the page:
• AIFF = uncompressed PCM in big-endian byte order; WAV = the same samples little-endian — identical sound, identical size
• a 4-minute CD-quality track is 42.336 MB in AIFF, exactly as in WAV
• ALAC (2004, open-sourced 2011) compresses ~40–60% like FLAC; files run a few percent larger
• WavPack (1998, BSD-licensed) is the only codec with a hybrid mode (.wv lossy + .wvc correction = lossless pair)
• each format carries its own tag system: ID3v2 in AIFF, MP4 atoms in ALAC, APEv2 in WavPack
AIFF: the Mac world's WAV
AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) came from Apple in 1988, based on Electronic Arts' IFF chunk structure. It stores raw, uncompressed PCM with no compression at all — the same design philosophy as WAV, right down to the chunk layout. The one real difference is byte order: AIFF writes samples big-endian (most significant byte first), WAV writes them little-endian. That is why a 4-minute CD-quality track is exactly 42.336 MB in either format, and why converting between the two changes nothing audible — it just rewrites the same samples in the opposite byte order. AIFF remains the standard interchange format in Logic Pro and much of the pro-audio world.
ALAC: Apple Lossless in an M4A container
ALAC shipped with iTunes in 2004 as Apple's answer to FLAC, and was open-sourced under the Apache license in 2011. It compresses PCM losslessly by 40–60% — the same territory as FLAC, usually a few percent larger for the same input. Its advantage is ecosystem: an ALAC file is just an M4A container, so iTunes, Apple Music, iPhones, iPods and Android devices all play it natively with no plugins, which FLAC on Apple devices historically did not. Metadata rides in MP4 atoms — the same tagging structure AAC files use — and the tag editor above writes those atoms directly.
WavPack: the audiophile's Swiss knife
WavPack, created by David Bryant in 1998 and BSD-licensed, does everything the mainstream lossless codecs do — compression levels (0 fastest to 8 smallest), arbitrary sample rates and channel counts, 32-bit float support — plus two features nothing else offers. Hybrid mode splits a file into a small lossy .wv (say ~50% size) and a correction .wvc; the .wv alone plays anywhere as a decent lossy file, and .wv+.wvc together decode bit-identically to the original — one recording, two quality tiers, no double encode. Tags use the APEv2 system, and the default compression level 3 above is the codec's own recommended balance of speed and size.
Common misconceptions
AIFF sounds better than WAV. No. Both store identical uncompressed PCM; the only difference is byte order inside the file. Any claimed sonic difference between the two is imagination or a broken player.
ALAC is lower quality than FLAC because files are bigger. No. Both are bit-exact lossless — both decode to the original samples every time. A few percent of size difference is compression efficiency, not fidelity.
Converting an MP3 to a lossless format restores lost quality. No. A lossless container can only preserve what the MP3 still contains. The 128 kbps artefacts are baked in; the ALAC or WavPack file will faithfully reproduce them at 2–3× the size.
