Convert MP3 to WAV
Turn an MP3 into an uncompressed WAV that every editor, DAW and CD burner accepts. The file is never stored, however long the recording is.
- Never stored
- No queue, no waiting
- No signup, no watermark
How it works
Add your MP3
Drop the file in — or an M4A, AAC, OGG, FLAC or WMA, which all convert here too. Its length, sample rate and channels are shown straight away.
Choose the bit depth
16-bit is the CD standard and what most software expects. 24-bit leaves headroom if you are going to process the sound further; 32-bit float is for mixing.
Download the WAV
One file, named after the MP3, with every sample the MP3 could give.
What a decoded MP3 actually is
A decoder does not recover the samples the MP3 was made from. It synthesises a waveform out of stored frequency coefficients — one that sounds like the original and is numerically nothing like it, as anyone who has tried to cancel the two against each other has found. The encoder's decisions arrive in the WAV as ordinary samples: the pre-echo smeared ahead of a sharp transient, and the low-pass filter the encoder applied, which at 128 kbps sits somewhere near 16 kHz and leaves everything above it permanently silent.
Decoding can also produce samples louder than anything in the original recording. A lossy encoder does not preserve peak levels, and reconstruction regularly overshoots past full scale — which a 16-bit WAV has nowhere to put, so those samples clip flat against the ceiling. That, rather than any recovery of detail, is the argument for 24-bit or 32-bit float here: room for the overshoot, and for whatever you do to the file next. The sample rate and the channel count are carried across untouched in every case — 44.1 kHz stereo in, 44.1 kHz stereo out.
When you want something else
Check whether the program you are feeding needs this at all. Audacity, Reaper and every current editor import an MP3 directly and work in floating point internally, so the WAV in between adds a step and a large file without adding information. Where PCM is genuinely required — a CD burner, a hardware sampler, broadcast software that accepts nothing else — ffmpeg will write it in one line and do a whole folder in a loop. And if the reason is archival rather than editing, FLAC holds exactly these decoded samples in roughly half the space, and any editor worth using reads it.
Frequently asked questions
Does converting MP3 to WAV improve the quality?
No, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. An MP3 discarded detail when it was made, and nothing can put that back. What a WAV does is stop the loss continuing: from here on the sound is stored exactly, so editing, trimming and re-saving cost nothing more. That is the real reason to convert.
Why is the WAV so much bigger?
Because it stores every sample rather than an approximation. A minute of 16-bit stereo at 44.1 kHz is about 10 MB whatever the source was, so a 3 MB MP3 becomes roughly a 30 MB WAV. That is the price of not compressing, and it is why WAV is a working format rather than a listening one.
Which bit depth should I choose?
16-bit unless you know you need more. It is the CD standard, every program reads it, and it is already beyond what an MP3 contains. Choose 24-bit if the file is going into a mix and will be processed further, and 32-bit float only if your editor asks for it.
Is my file stored anywhere?
No. Nothing is sent anywhere — no queue, no copy of your recording on someone's server, and it works with the Wi-Fi off.
Is there a size limit?
No fixed limit. The WAV is written as it is made rather than held in memory, so a long recording converts without trouble.
Which formats can I convert from?
MP3, M4A, AAC, OGG Vorbis, Opus, FLAC and WAV, plus WMA and the sound inside AVI, FLV and MPEG files — those last are decoded by the page itself, because no browser reads them on its own.
Good to know: A WAV cannot restore detail the MP3 already discarded; it stops further loss, it does not undo the first one. WAV files over 4 GB are not readable by much software, which a long recording at 24 or 32-bit can reach.
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