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. So 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's 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 samples here, I've got four different container types, an mp3, a WAV 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, like for instance, this OGG file, if we were to open it up with QuickTime Player, we can use Command-I to get info on it. And you could 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 could have individual settings. Like for instance, in this case, this audio file is set to 22,050 Hertz and it's mono. If I open up this WAV file here with QuickTime Player and get info on it, you could see it's using an audio format, linear PCM, and the details are 16-bit, little-endian, signed integer, 22,050 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, and it could also be the particular settings. It's just important to keep that in mind. That could explain why, for instance, one WAV file works in a situation and another WAV 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 QuickTime Player that I showed before. I've actually put it here in the dock so we have easy access to drag and drop one of these files onto QuickTime Player to open it in that. And you could see it opens fine. In fact, all four of these files will open and play just fine in QuickTime Player, and you could skim through it. You could hit play, pause, and all of that. In fact, the playback mechanism in QuickTime Player is the same one that's part of a system. So for instance, you can use QuickLook with any one of these. I could just press space bar and I could play this file. I could play the WAV file. I could 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 QuickTime Player. In fact, for audio, you just have audio only. That's it. And when we do that, it's going to save it out as just one container type, the M4A container, so it's got an M4A extension. And 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 QuickTime Player and get info on it, you could see here that the audio format is MPEG4AAC, and you'll find that works in just about anything on your Mac or on any Apple device. And the same goes for all of these other file types. You can definitely open those up in QuickTime 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. And 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 and 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, same thing. But the MP3 file you could see will import. I can drop it in here. The same thing with this WAV file here. I can drop that in as well. And you could see it'll do a little conversion once I do that. And then I'll have this WAV 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 QuickTime Player for importing. If you did need to import a FLAC or OGG file, you could have just used QuickTime Player to convert it to M4A and then brought that into GarageBand. And the advantage of having it in GarageBand over QuickTime Player is you could go to share, exports on disk, and you've got more export formats. You can do AAC just like QuickTime 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 that it's not 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 an MP3 file here. If I open this up in QuickTime Player and get info on it, you can see the audio format is MPEG layer three, which is MP3, you can see converted it to 44, 100 Hertz and stereo. Obviously I didn't need those specs there, but the GarageBand project was stereo. That's why you get stereo output. Still, it gets the job done. If you find these videos valuable, consider joining the more than 3,000 others that support MacBoost through Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com slash Patreon. 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 WAV 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 WAV file using this. If we open this one up in QuickTime player and get info, we could see similar output here as what was contained in the WAV 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 and 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, which 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, and then you're going to want to take one of these files and bring it in. And 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 I take the WAV file, that works. And if I take the MP3 file, that works. Let's do the WAV 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 could find it here. There it is. Now I can select it and I can go to file and convert, and 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, and you can see it's actually working right there. And when it's done, I can drag it out of the music app and I get a file there. An M4A file. Let me drag it down here to QuickTime Player and I can examine it. So that looks good, but is M4A AAC the only thing you can do? Actually, no. You can go to music settings and in here you can go to files and then you can go to import settings. Yes, import, not export. But here you'll find the encoders and you have a bunch of different stuff, including MP3 and WAV. 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's import is when you import, say from a CD, this is what it's going to use as the format. But that same thing is used for conversion as well. And now instead of AAC, it says create MP3 version. And when it's done, I could drag this one out and I'll bring it into QuickTime Player and you could see the result there, MPEG layer three. 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 brought into it. Now there is one other way I want to show you how you can do it. And this could 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 the terminal that you already have on your Mac called AFConvert. And 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 could 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 an M4A file. So you could see you provide the format M4AF and also the codec there, AAC. And it'll convert it and I'll get this output here, which then I could try out in QuickTime Player and see the result. Likewise, this will work fine with the OGG file as well. And you can see it'll convert that and it works to convert the MP3 file as well. And 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. And of course there are tons of third-party apps, some specifically designed to convert from many formats to many other formats. And there are lots of other apps that play back 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. Want to know about every new MacMost video each week? Sign up for the absolutely free MacMost email newsletter at macmost.com slash newsletter.