Convert ALAC to WAV — Free Online Converter

ALAC stores lossless compressed audio at roughly 50% of raw PCM size in Apple's M4A container. WAV stores uncompressed PCM in Microsoft's RIFF container at full size — approximately 10 MB per minute for 44.1 kHz/16-bit stereo. Both preserve identical audio quality, but ALAC is compressed while WAV is not.

Converting ALAC to WAV decompresses the lossless audio to raw PCM. The output is bit-for-bit identical to the original recording — this is a perfect lossless operation. WAV is the most universally compatible audio format, working on every platform, device, and software without codec dependencies.

WAV is the universal standard that every audio system understands. Some DAWs, hardware devices, and embedded systems cannot decode ALAC and require raw WAV input. Scientific audio analysis tools, CD burning software, and some broadcast systems also expect uncompressed WAV.

WAV eliminates all codec dependencies — the file contains nothing but raw PCM samples and a simple RIFF header. This makes WAV the safest format for archival, interchange, and processing when codec support cannot be guaranteed.

FFmpeg decodes the ALAC stream from M4A, reversing the linear prediction and entropy coding to recover the original PCM samples, then writes them into a WAV RIFF container with little-endian byte order. The output preserves the exact sample rate, bit depth, and channel layout. The file size roughly doubles since ALAC compression is removed.