5 Ways To Convert Audio Files On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at ways to convert audio files on your Mac.

There are tons of different file types and formats for audio. So you may run into audio that isn't a format that you want to use or maybe doesn't work in an app that you want to use the audio in and you need to convert it from one to the other. But it is important to realize first that there are actually three different things when it comes to an audio-file. There's the audio file itself, the Container, and usually we refer to that by its file extension. For instance as examples here I've got four different Container types. An MP3, a Wave File, a Flac File, and an OGG File. So these are four different types of files. Four different Containers. But they don't tell the whole story because many file types can actually have different encoding formats inside them. 

So when you look at a file, for instance this OGG file, if we were to open it up with Quick Time Player we can use Command i to get info on it. You can see here the audio format is something called Vorbis. OGG supports that format and others as well. But that's still not the whole story because with each audio format you can have individual settings. Like, for instance, in this case this audio file is set to 22050 hertz and it is mono. If I open up this Wave file here with Quick Time Player and get information on it you can see it's using an audio format Linear PCM and the details are 16bit little indian signed integer 2250 hertz and also mono. So if an audio file doesn't work with an app or device that you're using it could be the file type or the Container. 

But it could also be the format inside that. It could also be the particular settings. It is just important to keep that in mind. That could explain why, for instance, one wave file works in a situation and another wave file doesn't. 

But let's get to converting these into a format that we know will work for just about any Mac application. So the first way I'm going to show you to convert is using that very Quick Time Player that I showed before. I've actually put it here in the Dock so we have easy access to Drag & Drop one of these files onto Quick Time Player to open it in that. You can see it opens fine. In fact all four of these files will open and play just fine in Quick Time Player. You can skim through it. You can hit Play, Pause, and all of that. In fact the Playback mechanism in Quick Time Player is the same one that is part of a system. So, for instance, you can use Quicklook with any one of these. I can just press Spacebar and I can Play this file. I can Play the Wave file. I can Play the Flac File, or the OGG file. 

Now if you want to convert to another format you can as well. You can go to File, and then you can Export As. You have limited Export options in Quick Time Player. In fact for audio you just have Audio Only. That's it. When we do that it's going to save it out as just one Container type, M4A Container. So it's got a M4A extension. When we save that out it will take just a few seconds there for the short file and you'll see it here. If I were to open this one up in Quick Time Player and get info on it, you could see here that the audio format is MPeg4AAC. You'll find that works in just about anything on your Mac or on any Apple device. The same goes for all of these other file types. You can definitely open those up in Quick Time Player and they will play and you can go and export them as. 

Now let's go beyond that and see if we can produce other file types. To do that we're going to use GarageBand. GarageBand is free from Apple so if you don't already have it you can get it from The App Store. When you start GarageBand you want to create a new empty project and choose mic or line. You're just going to get an empty project here with an empty track that you can Drag & Drop something into. Now this is where it gets a bit tricky. Because if you try to Drop In a Flac file it won't work. An OGG file, the same thing. But the MP3 file you could see will import. I can drop it in here. The same thing with this Wave File here. I can drop that in as well. You can see it will do a little conversion once I do that. Then I'll have this Wave file there in a track.

So now you can see in GarageBand I've got it here and I can play it. So GarageBand supports less than Quick Time Player for importing. If you did need to import a Flac or OGG file you could have just used Quick Time Player to convert it to M4A and then brought that into GarageBand. The advantage you're having it in GarageBand over Quick Time Player is you can go to Share, Export Song To Disk, and you've got more export formats. You can do AAC just like Quick Time Player. But you get to choose a few quality levels. You can also do MP3 and choose from those same quality levels. Note before you export you want to turn off the Metronome so it's no going to do the click track over it. So now I'll go back to File, Export Song to Disk, MP3, choose quality and I'll export. 

So now you can see I've got a MP3 file here. If I open this up in Quick Time Player and get info on it you can see the audio format is MPEG layer 3, which is MP3. You can see it converted it to 44100 hertz and stereo. Obviously I didn't need those specs there but the GarageBand Project was stereo. That's why you get a stereo output. Still, it gets the job done. 

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Now there's another way to do this which doesn't even use any app at all. If you select a file, like this MP3 file here, Control Click, right click, or two-finger click to bring up the Context Menu go to Services. You should find Encode Selected Audio Files. When you select that it runs basically a little mini app that lets you convert to MPEG audio. You can use Continue there and what you're going to get for all but one of these files is this error here. It's going to tell you that it only supports a few select formats. In this case only Wave out of all those files is supported. So we can test it with that and see that it works and we do, in fact, get an M4A file from the Wave file using this. So we open this one up in Quick Time Player and get info. We can see similar output here as what was contained in the Wave file. So this is the least versatile of all the options because it doesn't really support very much in terms of input. It doesn't have too many options in terms of output. But it is handy if it does happen to work with files that you've got. If you need to convert a lot of them it could be a quick way to do that. 

Now let's look at an odd and interesting option. The Music App. The Music App is, of course, what you use to buy music from iTunes to use the Apple Music Streaming Service to have your own library of music and be able to create playlists and all of that. That's what you mainly use it for. But all the way back to the beginning when it was called iTunes in the very first version you could use it as a way to convert to MP3. 

So to do that you're going to want to run the Music App. Then you're going to want to take one of these files and bring it in. Note, it doesn't support all the types. If I take the odd file and try to drag it into my library, I get nothing. If I take the Flac File, nothing. If the take the Wave file, that works and if I take the MP3 file that works. Let's do the Wave File and drag it here into your library in the App. Now I can go to My Library here, let's go to Songs, and I can find it here. There it is. Now, I can select it and I can go to File and Convert. I can create a new version of that. So I can say, create AAC version and it will convert it and I'll have a second one in My Library here. You can see it's actually working right there. When it is Done I can drag it out of the Music App and I get a file there, a M4A file. Let me drag it down here to Quick Time Player and I can examine it. So that looks good. But is M4A, AAC the only thing it can do? Actually no. You can go to Music, Settings and in here you can go to File and then you can go to Import Settings. Yes!, import not export. But here you'll find the Encoders. You have a bunch of different stuff. Including MP3 and Wave. If I choose MP3 I can choose Quality and even have some custom settings for it. So I can go beyond what I can do in GarageBand here. 

Now the reason it is Import is when you import, say, from a CD this is what it's going to use as the format. But the same thing is used for Conversion as well. Now instead of AAC it says Create MP3 version. When it is done I can drag this one out and I'll bring it into Quick Time Player and you can see the result there, MPEG Layer 3. So that's a really strange way to do it but actually Mac users have been doing it that way for years. Note that it won't work with stuff that you already have in Music like stuff from Apple Music's Streaming Service. It has to be stuff that you have brought into it. 

Now there is one other way I want to show you how you can do it and this can be especially useful if you like using the Terminal or maybe Shortcuts with Shell Scripts, things like that. There is a Terminal Command, a little mini app, inside of the Terminal that you already have on your Mac called afconvert. If I do afconvert-h I'll get tons of information about how to use this. So if you really want to know how to use it and what it works with you're going to have to read all of that or search online for In-depth manuals on how to use this command. 

I'm going to go into this folder here and now that I'm in here and I can see those files in there I'm going to try using it on some of them. So, for instance, here's the afconvert command to convert that Flac file to a M4A file. So you can see you provide the format, M4AF and also the codec there AAC and it will convert it and I'll get this output here which then I try out in Quick Time Player and see the result. Likewise, this will work fine with the OGG File as well. You can see it will convert that and it works to convert the MP3 file as well. You can see it just replaced this one here. 

Now unfortunately it doesn't really convert to a lot of different formats so it's not going to be useful for instance, out of the box to convert to MP3. Of course there are tons of third party apps, some specifically designed to convert from many formats to many other formats. There are lots of other apps that playback and stream media that will also do audio conversions. So if you want to go beyond what comes with your Mac there are just tons of ways to do it. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.