Convert M4A to WAV/MP3

TODO: collapasable, copyable, download, etc

On Mac OS X, I have an m4a audio file, how can I convert that to either wav or mp3 using existing CLI tools?On macOS, you can use existing command-line tools like ffmpeg or afconvert to convert audio files from M4A to WAV or MP3. Here’s how you can use these tools:

Using ffmpeg

First, you need to install ffmpeg if you haven't already. You can do this using Homebrew:

brew install ffmpeg

Then, you can use the following commands to convert your M4A file to WAV or MP3:

To convert M4A to WAV:

ffmpeg -i input.m4a output.wav

To convert M4A to MP3:

ffmpeg -i input.m4a output.mp3

Using afconvert

afconvert is a built-in macOS command-line tool for audio conversion. You can use it as follows:

To convert M4A to WAV:

afconvert -f WAVE -d LEI16 input.m4a output.wav

To convert M4A to MP3 (note: afconvert doesn't support direct MP3 conversion, so you'll need ffmpeg for MP3):

For direct MP3 conversion, use ffmpeg as shown above.

Example Usage

Assuming you have a file named audio.m4a:

Convert to WAV using ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i audio.m4a audio.wav

Convert to MP3 using ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i audio.m4a audio.mp3

Convert to WAV using afconvert:

afconvert -f WAVE -d LEI16 audio.m4a audio.wav

These commands will create audio.wav or audio.mp3 from your audio.m4a file.

Convert M4A to WAV/MP3 created at Tue Jan 20 1970 21:26:52 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)