# AAC to MP3

Convert AAC audio to MP3 so older players and car stereos will open it. Free, no signup, and the file is never uploaded.

Canonical page: https://filetity.com/aac-to-mp3

## Capabilities

- Free: Yes, with no watermark and no page limit.
- Account required: No. There is no account system.
- Processed on device: Yes. The file is read by your browser and never uploaded. There is no server to send it to.
- Formats: Bare .aac streams and AAC inside M4A or MP4. MP3 out, or WAV if you want no further loss.
- Limits: A file with DRM on it cannot be converted by anything running in a browser and is refused rather than producing something broken.
- Mobile: Yes, on any modern mobile browser. Large files are limited by the memory the phone gives the browser.
- Offline: Yes, once the page has loaded. The tool keeps working with no network connection.

## Questions

### What is the difference between .aac and .m4a?

The codec is the same and the wrapper is not. A bare .aac file is a raw stream with almost nothing around it, and an .m4a puts that same audio in an MP4 container with room for tags, chapters and artwork. Both open here, because the audio inside is what is being converted.

### Is AAC better than MP3?

At the same bitrate, generally yes, which is why Apple, YouTube and broadcast all use it. That is also why converting to MP3 is a step down in efficiency rather than up. The only good reason to do it is a device or a program that will not open AAC, which usually means a car stereo or something old.

### Should I pick WAV instead?

If the file is going into an editor, yes. WAV is uncompressed, so nothing further is discarded, at the cost of a much larger file. If the file is going to a player, MP3 is the right answer, because a WAV is roughly ten times the size for audio that will sound the same on a phone or a car speaker.

### Why does my file play here but not in my program?

Because the browser has a decoder your program does not. AAC support is close to universal in browsers and patchy in older desktop software and hardware. That gap is exactly what this page exists to close, and it is why the conversion can happen locally at all.

### Does the bitrate stay the same?

Not exactly, and it should not. The target is capped by what the source actually spends, so a 128 kbps AAC will not be given 320 kbps of MP3, which would make a larger file with no more detail in it. What you get is a sensible MP3 bitrate at or below the source's own.

## Related tools

- [M4A to MP3](https://filetity.com/m4a-to-mp3): Convert an M4A or AAC file to MP3, which plays on anything.
- [Audio Converter](https://filetity.com/audio-converter): Convert audio between MP3, M4A, WAV and OGG, on your own device.