Music and video come in a baffling variety of formats — so much so that sometimes you stare at a file's extension and wonder what it even is. Plus, there's player compatibility, device compatibility, playback quality, and 99 other reasons why you may need to change the format of a media file. That's why we've put together a guide on how to convert video, music, and video to music — and as a bonus, how to download an MP3 track from a YouTube video.
It can also hold audio data that exceeds the size of 4 GB. MPEG-4 Audio File – M4A is the common file format used on Apple iTunes. In addition to audio track, M4A files also store additional data like images. What sets these files apart from other audio files is that lossless compression is available for M4A files as well.
How to convert video to audio Converting video to audio — MP4 to MP3, for example — means not so much converting the video file as extracting the audio track from it. That comes in handy when you want to turn your collection of music videos into a playlist to put on an iPod, or distil the sound from a video you took at a concert, or maybe use your favorite La La Land song as a ringtone for your iPhone (please don't, though).
MacOS comes with built-in media encoding functionality that lets you convert video to audio right in the Finder. There's a similar feature in QuickTime, too. The downside is it's fairly limited in that you can't pick what the resulting audio file will be, because it generates an M4A track by default. The native video to audio converter works like this:. Right-click on the file. Select Services in the drop-down menu, and then Encode Selected Video Files.
Select Audio Only as a Setting in the window that opens and click Continue. The M4A file will show up in the same location as the original video and will have the same name. While M4A works well for iTunes, you might want a little more control over the audio format you're getting. The most common scenario is converting video to MP3, and that's where Mac's built-in converter falls flat. Fortunately, there's a whole range of third-party apps that do the job. Our all-time favorite is Permute: it lets you convert just about any video to just about any audio with a simple drag-and-drop. Plus, it has iPhone ringtone as one of the options, so if you absolutely insist on a custom ringtone, you can finally have it without going through the quest of generating it in iTunes.
Anyway, here's how to convert MP4 to MP3, for example:. Open and drag-and-drop the video file into the app. Pick MP3 in the drop-down menu in the upper right corner.
Permute is super fast, so you should have your audio in the same folder as the video file in no time. Go ahead and feed it some of your movies to see how well it works (you can for a week when you join Setapp, a subscription for Mac apps.) How do I convert video and music to another format? 'MKV to MP4', 'FLAC to MP3', 'M4A to MP3' — chances are you typed one of those into Google search at some point, because media file formats can be a pain. Some are way too space-consuming, like FLACs, which can be 10 times bigger than equivalent MP3s.
Others are unsupported by your Mac's built-in video player, like MKV. No matter the specific case, you're going to need an audio or video converter to transform the file into a friendlier, more widely used format, which is typically MP4 for video and MP3 for music.
Luckily, Permute has your back here as well. It can convert a video or audio file to a different format the same way it turns video into audio. In case you skipped the previous section, this is how you can convert music and movies with Permute:. Open the app and drag-and-drop your file into it.
Select the resulting file format in the upper right corner. Click Start. Permute supports a few dozen video formats and over 10 for audio, which means it can handle pretty much any media file you throw at it. And by the way, if you're unsure which format you need in the end because all you want is for the file to open on your iPhone or Apple TV, Permute has you covered. You just pick 'Apple TV' or 'iPhone' as the resulting format and the app will figure out the rest.
Long story short, make sure you give it a try, because a media converter simply doesn't get better than this. In case you're just looking for a way to open a video with an uncommon extension, a more advanced player like Elmedia Player can be enough. It supports an impressive array of video and audio formats, so if your file can be played Elmedia will probably play it. Both Elmedia Player and Permute are, a subscription service with some 100+ Mac apps and a free trial week. After signing up, you'll get access to all the apps right away.
How to convert a YouTube video to MP3 YouTube is a goldmine of music videos, and many people still use it as their primary source of music, even though subscriptions like Spotify are taking over. If you're one of them, at some point you probably looked for a 'YouTube video converter' — an app that would let you skim music from your favorite videos on YouTube in the form of MP3 files. While the term is technically incorrect, because you'd be downloading the audio track from an online video rather than actually converting that video, there are a few good Mac apps that can help you out. Specifically, Elmedia Player, the multifunctional media player we mentioned earlier, and Downie, a simple downloads app for Mac.
Important: Before downloading any content from YouTube, make sure you're not violating. So, let's take a quick look at how this works in both apps so you can decide which one suits you better. Downie is pretty easy to figure out, and it does the job well. To 'convert' a YouTube video to MP3, just do this:. Open.
Select Extract Audio Only in the Settings in your menu bar. Drag-and-drop the link to the video into the app. Downie saves the track to Downloads as an MP3 file for your listening pleasure.
Elmedia Player might be a little less straightforward, but on the bright side, it gives you more options as to saving and playing all kinds of online media, so it's definitely worth giving a shot. To save the audio track from a YouTube video with, follow these steps:. Open the app and switch to Browser mode (click Window in the menu bar and checkmark Browser in the drop-down menu). Paste the YouTube link into the built-in browser and hit Enter. Go to the Audio tab in the menu underneath your video.
You'll see the audio track right there. Hit Download next to it. The big plus of Elmedia Player is that you can keep browsing YouTube within the app after you're done downloading, which can streamline the process when you need to save multiple tracks in one sitting. Both Downie and Elmedia Player are Setapp apps, which means you can try them for free, since the first week of the service is on the house. Plus, there are no feature limitations or in-app purchases on Setapp, so it's by far the best way to try the full capabilities of Elmedia Player and Downie without reaching for your wallet. You can just and then see how it goes. Well, that's it: now you're all set to transform music and video files the way you want.
Install your new helpful tools and enjoy media content to your heart's content. These might also interest you:.
Advertisement Audio files come in all types and sizes. And while we may all be familiar with MP3, what about AAC, FLAC, OGG, or WMA? Why do so many standards exist? Which ones should you care about and which ones can you ignore? It’s actually quite simple once you realize that all audio formats fall into three major categories.
Once you know which category you want, all you have to do is pick the format within that category that best suits your needs. Uncompressed Audio Formats Uncompressed audio is exactly what it sounds like: real sound waves that have been captured and converted to digital format without any further processing. As a result, uncompressed audio files tend to be the most accurate but take up a LOT of disk space — about 34 MB per minute for 24-bit 96 KHz stereo. PCM PCM stands for Pulse-Code Modulation, a digital representation of raw analog audio signals. Analog sounds exist as waveforms, and in order to convert a waveform into digital bits, the sound must be sampled and recorded at certain intervals (or pulses).
As such, this digital audio format has a “sampling rate” (how often a sample is made) and a “bit depth” (how many bits are used to represent each sample). There is no compression involved. The digital recording is a close-to-exact representation of the analog sound. PCM is the most common audio format used in CDs and DVDs.
There is a subtype of PCM called Linear Pulse-Code Modulation, where samples are taken at linear intervals. LPCM is the most common form of PCM, which is why the two terms are almost interchangeable at this point. WAV WAV stands for Waveform Audio File Format (also called Audio for Windows at some point but not anymore). It’s a standard that was developed by Microsoft and IBM back in 1991. A lot of people assume that all WAV files are uncompressed audio files, but that’s not exactly true. WAV is actually just a Windows container for audio formats. This means that a WAV file can contain compressed audio, but it’s rarely used for that.
Most WAV files contain uncompressed audio in PCM format. The WAV file is just a wrapper for the PCM encoding, making it more suitable for use on Windows systems. However, Mac systems can usually open WAV files without any issues. AIFF AIFF stands for Audio Interchange File Format.
Similar to how Microsoft and IBM developed WAV for Windows, AIFF is a format that was developed by Apple for Mac systems back in 1988. Also similar to WAV files, AIFF files can contain multiple kinds of audio. For example, there is a compressed version called AIFF-C and another version called Apple Loops which is used by GarageBand and Logic Audio — and they all use the same AIFF extension. Most AIFF files contain uncompressed audio in PCM format. The AIFF file is just a wrapper for the PCM encoding, making it more suitable for use on Mac systems. However, Windows systems can usually open AIFF files without any issues. Lossy Compressed Audio Formats Lossy compression is a form of compression that loses data during the compression process.
In the context of audio, that means sacrificing quality and fidelity for file size. The good news is that, in most cases, In this article, we'll take a look at how music compression works, and whether it has any real effect on how your music actually sounds. However, if the audio gets compressed too much or too often, you’ll start hearing artifacts and other weirdnesses that become more and more noticeable. MP3 MP3 stands for MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3. It was released back in 1993 and quickly exploded in popularity, eventually becoming the most popular audio format in the world for music files.
There’s a reason why we have “MP3 players” but not “OGG players” The main pursuit of MP3 is to cut out all of the sound data that exists beyond the hearing range of most normal people and to reduce the quality of sounds that aren’t as easy to hear, and then to compress all other audio data as efficiently as possible. Nearly every digital device in the world with audio playback can read and play MP3 files, whether we’re talking about PCs, Macs, Androids, iPhones, Smart TVs, or whatever else.
When you need universal, MP3 will never let you down. Note that MP3 and MP4 make up two of the most common media file formats today - but despite the apparent similarity, the two couldn't be more different from each other. Here's our comparison breakdown., even though their similar names might suggest otherwise. AAC AAC stands for Advanced Audio Coding. It was developed in 1997 as the successor to MP3, and while it did catch on as a popular format to use, it never really overtook MP3 as the most popular for everyday music and recording. The compression algorithm used by AAC is much more advanced and technical than MP3, so when you compare a particular recording in MP3 and AAC formats at the same bitrate, the AAC one will generally have better sound quality. Again, even though MP3 is more of a household format, AAC is widely used today.
In fact, it’s the standard audio compression method used by YouTube, Android, iOS, iTunes, later Nintendo portables, and later PlayStations. OGG (Vorbis) OGG doesn’t stand for anything. Actually, it’s not even a compression format.
OGG is a multimedia container that can hold all kinds of compression formats, but is most commonly used to hold Vorbis files — hence why these audio files are called Ogg Vorbis files. Vorbis was first released in 2000 and grew in popularity due to two reasons: first, it adheres to the principles of open source software, and second, it performs significantly better than most other lossy compression formats (i.e.
Produces a smaller file size for equivalent audio quality). MP3 and AAC have such strong footholds that OGG has had a hard time breaking into the spotlight — not many devices support it natively — but it’s getting better with time. For now, it’s mostly used by hardcore proponents of open software.
WMA WMA stands for Windows Media Audio. It was first released in 1999 and has gone through several evolutions since then, all while keeping the same WMA name and extension. As you might expect, it’s a proprietary format created by Microsoft. Not unlike AAC and OGG, WMA was meant to address some of the flaws in the MP3 compression method — and as such, WMA’s approach to compression is pretty similar to AAC and OGG.
In other words, in terms of objective quality, WMA is better than MP3. But since WMA is proprietary, not many devices and platforms support it. It also doesn’t offer any real benefits over AAC or OGG, so in most cases when MP3 isn’t good enough, it’s simply more practical to go with one of those two instead.
Lossless Compressed Audio Formats On the other side of the coin is lossless compression, which is a method that reduces file size without any loss in quality between the original source file and the resulting file. The downside is that lossless compression isn’t as efficient as lossy compression, meaning equivalent files can be 2x to 5x larger. This is obviously much harder to do well, but there are a few good formats for this. And don’t confuse lossless compression with high-resolution audio ( High-Resolution Audio is new and impressive, but does it live up to the hype and excitement? Is it a gimmick? Or even a scam?). FLAC FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec.
A bit on the nose maybe, but it has quickly become one of the most popular lossless formats available since its introduction in 2001. What’s nice is that FLAC can compress an original source file by up to 60% without losing a single bit of data. What’s even nicer is that FLAC is an open source and royalty-free format rather than a proprietary one, so it doesn’t impose any intellectual property constraints.
FLAC is supported by most major programs and devices and is the main alternative to MP3 for CD audio. With it, you basically get the full quality of raw uncompressed audio in half the file size — what’s not to love about it?
ALAC ALAC stands for Apple Lossless Audio Codec. It was developed and launched in 2004 as a proprietary format but eventually became open source and royalty-free in 2011. ALAC is sometimes referred to as Apple Lossless. While ALAC is good, it’s slightly less efficient than FLAC when it comes to compression. However, Apple users don’t really have a choice between the two because iTunes and iOS both provide native support for ALAC and no support at all for FLAC. WMA WMA stands for Windows Media Audio. We covered it above in the lossy compression section, but we mention it here because there’s a lossless alternative called WMA Lossless that uses the same extension.
Confusing, I know. Compared to FLAC and ALAC, WMA Lossless is the worst in terms of compression efficiency but only slightly.
It’s a proprietary format so it’s no good for fans of open source software, but it is supported natively on both Windows and Mac systems. The biggest issue with WMA Lossless is the limited hardware support.
If you want lossless audio across multiple devices, you should stick with FLAC unless all of your devices are of the Windows variety. So Which Format Should You Use? For most people, the decision is actually pretty easy:. If you’re capturing and editing raw audio, use an uncompressed format. This way you’re working with the truest quality of audio possible. When you’re done, you can export to a compressed format. If you’re listening to music and want faithful audio representation, use lossless audio compression.
This is why audiophiles always scramble for FLAC albums over MP3 albums. Note that you’ll need more storage space for these. If you’re okay with “good enough” music quality, if your audio file doesn’t have any music, or if you need to conserve disk space, use lossy audio compression. Most people actually can’t hear the difference between lossy and lossless compression. For those who want utmost quality in their music playback, note that high-quality audio files won’t matter if your playback device can’t faithfully recreate those sounds. Meaning, you need to have good quality speakers or In this guide we'll cut through the jargon and show you what the key headphone specifications actually mean, and why — or if — they matter.! And if you’re an audiophile, check out Virtual Studio Technology makes music production easier than ever, and these free VST plugins are the best of the best.
Are you an audiophile? What kind of audio formats do you use most often? Got any other tips for picking the right format in the right situation? Share with us in the comments! Image Credits:, Explore more about:,.
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