Every audio tool, in one place.

Lossy or lossless?

MP3, AAC, M4A, OGG and Opus are lossy formats: they discard detail the ear is least likely to notice, which makes files a fraction of the size. WAV and AIFF are uncompressed, so they are exact and large. FLAC is lossless compression: the sound is identical to the WAV it came from, in a much smaller file.

Converting a lossy file to a lossless one does not bring the lost detail back. An MP3 converted to WAV sounds the same as the MP3 and takes far more space. That conversion is still worth doing when an editor, a DAW or a broadcast system only accepts WAV.

Which format should you pick?

Pick MP3 when the file has to play everywhere, from old car stereos to web players. Pick M4A or AAC for Apple devices and apps, where they give better quality than MP3 at the same size. Pick WAV for editing and for systems that ask for it, and FLAC to archive music without any loss.

For speech, a lower bitrate is plenty; music needs more. When a file is too large to send or upload, compress the MP3 to a target size rather than converting it to another lossy format, which would add a second round of loss.

Getting the audio out of a video

The extract tools keep the soundtrack of a video and drop the picture. Choose MP3 or AAC for listening, and WAV or FLAC when the audio is going into an editor and you want no further loss.

Transcription

Speech to text works best on a clear recording with one speaker at a time. A noisy room, music under the voice or several people talking at once lowers accuracy, so trim long silences and boost a quiet recording first if you can.

Privacy and limits

Audio conversions are uploaded to FileWhirl's own server, processed with ffmpeg and deleted after 1 hour; each tool's own page says where its file goes. Nothing is sent to a third party converter, and there is no watermark.