MP3 Audio Converter

Suppose you got a piece of wonderful music and you are desperate to enjoy it right away. Unfortunately, you can not since your media player does not support it.

If you are interested in the audio track in an MP4 video, you would like to extract its audio track and convert it to your favorite audio format.

What can you do then? Find an audio converter to convert your audio format to your desired one.

Overview of audio formats

An audio file format defines the way to store the audio data. It contains audio raw bit stream, and is usually embedded in a container format or an audio data format with defined storage layer. It can be uncompressed, or compressed to reduce the file size, often using lossy compression.

Basically, there are three types of audio formats: uncompressed, lossless compressed and lossy compressed.

The uncompressed audio file stores only the raw uncompressed bit stream. The Pulse-code modulation (PCM) or its variants, a method used to digitally represent sampled analog signals, is the major representative. The PCM is usually stored in a .wav file on Windows or in a .aiff file on macOS although it could be stored in a computer file.

The lossless compressed audio format stores data in less space without losing any information. Its encoding algorithm tries to find data patterns in the original bit stream and uses less bits to represent them. For instance, a silence in a sound takes up almost space no matter how long it is. Typical audio formats in this category include the FLAC, WavPack, Monkey's Audio, ALAC (Apple Lossless). They usually consumes half of spaces occupied by the original PCM stream, meaning the compression ratio is about 2:1. The original uncompressed data can be recreated from the compressed version.

The lossy compressed audio format gains even greater reductions in file size by removing some of the audio data and information. This, of course, sacrifies certain degree of audio quality, but the impact is minimal since the parts removed have the least effect on perceived quality based on varieties of hearing thresholds given by psychoacoustics. The amount of audible noise generated during the process is minmized by employing a variety of techniques. The MP3 and AAC are well-known lossy formats.

How to make the audio format conversion

Follow the steps below to make convert one audio format to another.

  • Go to IAudioConverter site.
  • Click on the Choose File button to upload your MP4 file.
  • Click on the Convert button to make the format conversion. Wait until the processing is done.
  • Click on the Download button to save your MP3 file.

Notice that there are some key terminologies for this type of tools.

Sample Rate, bitrate, and resolution

Sound is basically a wave that is continually changed. To make a computer process it easier, we have to turn it into a digital signal. We measure the amplitude of the wave periodically and store it as a number. The sample rate is how often we measure the wave i.e, how many amplitude values of the sound we grab per second, the resolution is how many different possible values there are (eg, 8-bit resolution means 28=256 possible values). The bitrate is simply the total number of bits of information stored per second of sound. It's a function of the sample rate, the bit resolution, and any kind of "compression" algorithm used to squish the information into a smaller space.

Most audio formats offer a range of degrees of compression, generally measured in bit rate. The lower the rate, the smaller the file and the more significant the quality loss.

How to choose optimal bitrate for lossy format

To save storage space, we need to choose the minimal bitrate that gives acceptable sound quality.

As a rule of thumb, 256kbps or higher is recommended.

In case, you would like to choose an optimal bitrate by yourself based on your system hardware and software configurations, you could follow the steps below.

  • Find a few lossless files such as FLAC, WAV, and AIFF.
  • Convert each of them to mp3 with different bitrates by the iAudioConverter.
  • Compare the sound quality of the mp3 files with their originals. Give a score for each of the bitrates.
  • Determine the best quality with the minimal bitrate.

Conclusion

The iAudioConverter is one of the best online audio MP3 converters. Audio format conversion has never been so easy. Just follow the above steps to make the audio format conversion, for free.

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