MP4 to M4A Converter

Drag & Drop or Click to Select a Video

MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, or an audio file

Tip: paste an audio file from clipboard (Ctrl/⌘+V).

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Settings are written to the URL as you change them. Nothing differs from the defaults yet.

Convert MP4 to M4A

Take the AAC audio out of an MP4 and write it into an M4A file, untouched. Nothing is decoded on the way through, so this is the one extraction that costs nothing in quality.

Same codec, different container

Both .mp4 and .m4a are ISO base media containers. AAC audio sits happily in either, and the only real difference is that .m4a tells players and file managers to treat the file as audio. Copying the track across is a rewrite of the wrapper, not of the sound.

That is why the bitrate control is missing from this page. There is no encoder to set a bitrate on. Whatever the video was mastered at, 128 kbps or 256 kbps, is what lands in the M4A.

When to pick MP3 instead

MP3 is worth the second lossy pass in one situation: a destination that will not read AAC. Podcast hosts, older hardware players, and some upload forms still ask for it. Everything else, including every phone and browser in use, plays M4A. If MP3 is required, that page is here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is anything lost in this conversion?

No. The encoded audio packets are copied from one container to the other. No decoder and no encoder runs, so the samples are identical to the ones in the video.

Why is it so much faster than the other formats?

There is no decoding or encoding to do. The work is reading the packets and writing a new container around them, which runs at disk speed.

What if the MP4 does not hold AAC?

MP4 usually carries AAC, but it can carry ALAC, MP3, or something the muxer here cannot write. When the codec cannot be copied, the export falls back to WAV. Open the full tool to pick a format yourself.

Will an M4A play everywhere an MP3 does?

Close to it. Apple devices, Android, Windows, browsers, and most car head units read M4A. Older hardware players and some podcast pipelines still expect MP3.