M4A to WAV Converter

M4A is an audio-only MPEG-4 container, most often holding AAC audio — it's what Apple Music and Voice Memos save by default.

M4A is essentially an MPEG-4 container that's been restricted to audio only, and it's the extension Apple uses by default across iTunes downloads, Apple Music, GarageBand, and Voice Memos. In almost every practical case it holds AAC-encoded audio, so its quality and compression characteristics are effectively the same as AAC — it's really a matter of which extension a given piece of Apple software happened to save the file with.

WAV stores audio with no compression at all, which is why it's the standard format in recording studios and audio editing software.

WAV (Waveform Audio File Format) was created jointly by Microsoft and IBM in the early 1990s as a simple container for raw, uncompressed audio samples. Storing audio with no compression means there's never any generation loss from repeated saving and no decoding overhead when a program reads it, both of which matter enormously in a studio environment where a track might be opened, edited, and re-saved dozens of times before it's finished. The obvious tradeoff is size — a few minutes of CD-quality stereo audio can easily run to tens of megabytes — so WAV is rarely the format anyone actually distributes a finished track in.