Convert WAV to MP3

Some, and it is permanent — this is the one direction where information is genuinely thrown away. WAV holds every sample exactly; MP3 discards what a psychoacoustic model predicts you will not hear. At 192 kbps and above that prediction is good enough to be transparent on most material and most equipment. Keep the WAV as your master, because you cannot get back to it from the MP3. WAV normally stores raw uncompressed PCM — every sample kept exactly, at whatever bit depth and sample rate was captured. MP3 is lossy: a psychoacoustic model discards frequencies the ear is unlikely to notice, typically at 128 to 320 kbps.

Yes, and it is a genuine gain over WAV, which has nowhere dependable to store any of it. MP3 carries title, artist, album, year, track number and embedded cover art in the container itself, so a music library files it correctly without a manual pass. Nothing beats MP3 for compatibility — car stereos, gym equipment, DAPs and twenty-year-old hardware all read it without question.

It is folded down to stereo, because MP3 has no practical multichannel mode. The downmix uses the standard coefficients so centre-channel dialogue stays clear and the surrounds are mixed in at reduced level. Anything that depended on discrete channel placement is gone once that happens. MP3 is technically outclassed by AAC and Opus at every bitrate, cannot store more than two channels usefully, and always adds a small encoder delay.

Free accounts cap at 100 MB per file, and WAV sources run large because the format carries substantial per-chunk overhead on top of the video data. Premium lifts the cap considerably. If the file is split into numbered parts because of the format ceiling, upload them together and they are treated as one job. WAV is enormous — roughly 10 MB per stereo minute at CD quality — and the classic format has a 4 GB ceiling and no room for proper tags.

Default is 192 kbps for lossy MP3; pass-through for lossless MP3. Override to 320 kbps for audiophile or 64-96 kbps for spoken-word audiobooks (transparent for voice, halves the file size).

If WAV is lossy and MP3 is lossless (e.g. MP3 → WAV), the MP3 file is no better than the WAV — you can't recover information that's already been thrown away. If WAV is lossless and MP3 is lossy, expect the MP3 codec to recompress; at 192 kbps this is transparent for most content.

Yes — title, artist, album, year, track number, album art, and chapter markers (important for audiobooks) are read from WAV and written into the MP3 container where the MP3 format supports tags. M4B audiobook structure round-trips into M4B and AAX → M4B output.

Yes — drop a folder of WAV files in and we process them in parallel. Premium has more parallel workers and no per-file size cap, so a 500-file batch finishes in minutes rather than tens of minutes.

By default yes (48 kHz WAV → 48 kHz MP3). If you need to downsample for compatibility (e.g. 96 kHz → 44.1 kHz for CD burning) the advanced sample-rate option does this with high-quality resampling.

Yes — the loudness-normalize option applies ITU-R BS.1770 / EBU R128 normalization to the MP3 output, targeting -14 LUFS (streaming standard), -16 LUFS (podcast standard), or -23 LUFS (audiobook standard). Useful when batch-converting tracks with varying mastering levels.

MP3 plays universally. AAC plays on Apple, most Android, Sonos. FLAC plays on Sonos and Android, less well on older iPods. M4B audiobooks play with chapter navigation on iOS Books, Audiobookshelf, and Smart Audiobook Player. The advanced options include device presets.