Converting Between m4a, WAV, and FLAC
Direction decides quality: lossless-to-lossless is moving house, lossy-to-lossly is a photocopy of a photocopy. Know which family your file and target belong to.
Sort the families
Lossless: WAV, FLAC, ALAC — interconvert with zero loss; FLAC is half the size of WAV.
Lossy: MP3, M4A(AAC), OGG, Opus — each conversion discards more. Crossing over: lossless→lossy is normal publishing; lossy→lossless just repackages old data in a bigger box.
Three frequent scenarios
Legacy device wants MP3: convert to 192+ kbps.
Editor wants WAV/FLAC: convert MP3 to WAV to avoid another lossy generation inside the project.
Phone storage tight: FLAC to 256 kbps AAC halves size, indistinguishable to most ears.
Bitrate picks
MP3 archive 192-320 kbps; AAC 160-256 kbps matches quality at smaller size; speech 64-96 kbps. Below 128 kbps music sounds muffled on decent headphones.