This is the main format used on Windows PCs, although WAV files are also compatible with macOS and Linux.

According to Apple, audio files compressed as Apple Lossless files take up “about half the storage space,” compared to the equivalent uncompressed data. AIFF files typically use more disk space than lossy formats, such as MP3s.

The Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) was developed by Apple, and is therefore most commonly used on macOS. Designed to be the successor to MP3, Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression, that generally offers better sound quality than MP3s. This is arguably one of the best known audio compression formats, and is compatible with a wide range of different software and devices. There’s no need to splash out on dedicated audio conversion software! In this article, I share a quick and easy way to convert your audio files to a range of different formats, using your Mac’s built-in iTunes app. Perhaps you want to copy your favourite tracks to your MP3 player and realise that your entire audio library is in an incompatible format maybe you’ve branched out and downloaded a new song from somewhere other than iTunes, and its format doesn’t play nicely with your media player or maybe you’ve ripped a CD to your Mac and are unhappy with the default file type.

However, there’s plenty of scenarios where you may need to convert your music, audiobooks, podcasts, or other audio files, to a different format. If you only ever play your audio using the same piece of software, and always download your music from the same source, then you may never have to worry about converting audio files from one format to another. There’s a number of compression formats that are commonly used for audio.

Convert wav file to mp3 on mac