Convert 3GA to AIFF — Free Online Converter

AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) is Apple's uncompressed audio standard, widely used in professional music production and audio editing on macOS. If you have old voice recordings in 3GA format from a Samsung Galaxy S II, LG Optimus, or another 3G-era Android phone and need to bring them into Logic Pro, GarageBand, or Pro Tools on a Mac, converting to AIFF gives you an uncompressed PCM file that these applications handle natively without any import conversion or codec negotiation.

The 3GA format stores audio using AMR codecs at very low bitrates suited for mobile telephony over EDGE and UMTS networks. When you convert to AIFF, the AMR audio is decoded to raw PCM samples and wrapped in the AIFF container at CD-quality specifications (16-bit, 44.1 kHz). This does not improve the original recording quality — the frequencies lost during AMR encoding on the handset cannot be recovered — but it provides a clean, uncompressed representation that professional audio software works with efficiently.

Professional audio workflows on macOS are built around uncompressed formats. Logic Pro, GarageBand, Final Cut Pro, and Soundtrack Pro all treat AIFF as a first-class citizen, loading it instantly without any decoding overhead or transcoding step. If you need to edit old phone recordings — clean up background noise, normalize levels, trim silence, or splice segments together — working with AIFF ensures you are editing a lossless representation of the decoded audio without additional codec artifacts.

AIFF is also the standard format for sound effects libraries, audio samples, and broadcast production on Apple platforms. If you are incorporating old voice recordings from Nokia N-series phones or Samsung feature phones into a multimedia project, audio documentary, or podcast production workflow on a Mac, AIFF ensures compatibility with the Mac-centric tools most audio professionals use. The uncompressed nature means every edit and export from AIFF is bit-perfect, with no generational quality loss.

FFmpeg decodes the AMR-NB (8 kHz, 12.2 kbps max) or AMR-WB (16 kHz, 23.85 kbps max) audio stream from the 3GA container and re-encodes it as linear PCM (signed 16-bit big-endian) in the AIFF container. The output sample rate is 44.1 kHz stereo by default, though the original mono AMR content is duplicated to both channels. The resulting AIFF file uses approximately 1.4 Mbps (10.6 MB per minute), significantly larger than the source 3GA file but necessary for uncompressed editing workflows.