Best Free M4A to MP3 Converter?

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fullvietFX

[H]ard|Gawd
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Sep 1, 2004
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Can you guys recommend me a program to covert M4A files to MP3? Thanks and cheers.
 
You do of course realize that M4A is a lossy audio format and you're about to go from M4A to MP3 which is another lossy format meaning when you're done the MP3 files will technically be in far worse shape from an acoustic perspective than the M4A was, right?

I'm not saying it's not possible - people do this all the time with audio streams extracted from YouTube videos and other sources but, in the long run it's not helping at all and damaging the audio files just that much more.

I know many people have never even used a VHS video tape (let alone Beta) but the idea is akin to the generational loss of tape: make a recording of the original source, then copy that recording to another tape, then again, etc, and after just a few copies - hell, even the first copy of the original will look fairly bad - you're left with a result that is just crap plain and simple.

But foobar2000 and those additional components can do it, yep. M4A is a pretty popular format nowadays - it's typically just AAC audio and you can even rename an .m4a file to .aac and it'll probably play on most any modern media player without problems, so should .m4a for that matter.
 
I'm a fan of fre.ac. I use this to convert my FLACs to other formats (for devices that can't handle FLACs.)

https://www.freac.org/

Edit: And yeah lossy to lossy format conversion will always result in more data being lost, but if you're only doing this so you can listen to music on a device that can't handle M4A (like a really old MP3 player) it does the job.
 
I use dbPowerAmp for all of my music conversion. It also does batches.

It has codec's for practically any standard on the planet, so I don't see how it couldn't do what you want.

It is also multi-threaded/processor aware. It shreds through conversions from WMA Lossless to MP3 files, which is how I do things. I rip all my CD's to WMA Lossless, then when I need a batch of files for a particular device in a particular bitrate, I fire up dbPowerAmp, select the WMA Lossless folder as the source, tell it where to put the converted files, then walk away. I come back an hour or so later and I've got several thousand fresh, new MP3's ready to copy to that device.

It isn't free, but it's not expensive either.
 
TechLarry said:
I use dbPowerAmp for all of my music conversion. It also does batches.

It has codec's for practically any standard on the planet, so I don't see how it couldn't do what you want.

It is also multi-threaded/processor aware. It shreds through conversions from WMA Lossless to MP3 files, which is how I do things. I rip all my CD's to WMA Lossless, then when I need a batch of files for a particular device in a particular bitrate, I fire up dbPowerAmp, select the WMA Lossless folder as the source, tell it where to put the converted files, then walk away. I come back an hour or so later and I've got several thousand fresh, new MP3's ready to copy to that device.

It isn't free, but it's not expensive either.
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This! Thanks so much. I was looking for it, couldn't remember the name
 
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