Convert MP3 to WAV

How to Convert to WAV

1. 1

   Add your MP3 file

   Up to 200 MB per file and twenty files at a time. Everything is read by your own browser; there is no upload step to wait through.

2. 2

   Pick the bit depth

   16-bit is the safe default that opens everywhere. 24-bit and 32-bit float exist for editing, where headroom matters more than file size.

3. 3

   Click Convert and download the WAV

   The result is a plain PCM WAV with a standard 44-byte header, ready for any editor, sampler or transcription tool.

Converting to WAV cannot bring quality back

This is the single most common misunderstanding about this conversion, so here it is plainly: an MP3 has already thrown away the parts of the sound its encoder judged inaudible, and nothing can put them back. Converting to WAV takes what survived and stores it without further compression. The result is not a better-sounding file. It is the same sound in a format that will not lose anything more. That distinction matters, because it is exactly why the conversion is worth doing before you edit. Every time an MP3 is decoded, edited and re-encoded, the encoder throws away a little more; working in WAV between those steps stops the loss from compounding. If you want a better master, you need the original recording, not a conversion.

Why the file gets about eleven times bigger

A typical MP3 stores roughly 128 kilobits for every second of stereo sound. Uncompressed 16-bit stereo WAV at 44.1 kHz stores 1,411 kilobits per second, the sample rate times the bit depth times the number of channels, with no compression anywhere. That ratio is where the familiar ten-to-eleven-fold jump comes from, and it is not a sign that anything went wrong. Choosing 24-bit multiplies the size by another 1.5, and 32-bit float doubles it against 16-bit. If size is the problem rather than editability, converting back to a compressed format afterwards is the answer, not a lower bit depth.

Which bit depth to choose, and what dithering does

Pick 16-bit unless you know you need otherwise: it is the CD standard, it opens in everything, and for listening it is transparent. Pick 24-bit when the file is going into an editor and will have levels, fades or effects applied, because the extra headroom means rounding errors from those operations stay far below anything audible. Pick 32-bit float when the audio may temporarily exceed full scale during editing, because floating-point samples carry on past 0 dBFS instead of clipping. Dithering only applies to 16-bit, and it matters more than its name suggests. Rounding samples to a coarser grid does not produce clean noise: the rounding error follows the signal, which the ear hears as a grainy artefact on quiet passages rather than as hiss. Adding one least-significant-bit of triangular noise before rounding breaks that correlation. The cost is a hiss so quiet you will not find it; the benefit is that quiet fades stay smooth.

No engine to download on this page

Most audio conversion on the web runs on a WebAssembly build of ffmpeg, which is an 8 MB download before any work can start. This page never needs it. Decoding MP3 is something every browser already does natively through the Web Audio API, and writing a WAV header is forty-four bytes of straightforward code. That is the whole conversion. The page works on the first visit at the speed of your processor, and it keeps working with the network switched off.

Frequently asked questions

Guides

• MP3 vs WAV vs FLAC: Which One to Send, and Which to KeepMP3, WAV and FLAC solve three different problems, and picking the wrong one either wastes bandwidth or throws away quality for good.