Why convert
WAV is uncompressed: a minute of CD-quality stereo takes about 10 MB. The same minute as an MP3 at 128 kbps is about 1 MB, and most people cannot hear the difference at 192 kbps or above.
In your browser
- Open WAV to MP3.
- Choose a quality: 192 kbps for music, 128 kbps for speech and podcasts.
- Drop in the WAV file and download the MP3.
Which bitrate?
| Bitrate | Good for |
| 128 kbps | Speech, podcasts, voice memos (about 1 MB per minute) |
| 192 kbps | Most music |
| 320 kbps | The highest MP3 quality (about 2.4 MB per minute) |
With Audacity
Open the WAV in Audacity, choose File → Export Audio (or Export → Export as MP3 in older versions), pick MP3 and a quality, and save.
With FFmpeg
ffmpeg -i recording.wav -c:a libmp3lame -b:a 192k recording.mp3Keep the WAV if you will edit
MP3 throws away detail each time it is saved. Edit the WAV and convert to MP3 last.
A worked example
CD-quality WAV stores 44,100 samples a second, 2 bytes each, for 2 channels: 176,400 bytes a second, or about 10.6 MB a minute. A four-minute song is about 42 MB.
At 192 kbps an MP3 uses 24,000 bytes a second, about 1.4 MB a minute, so the same song is about 5.8 MB, roughly a seventh of the WAV.
Common problems
- The MP3 sounds no better at 320 kbps. If the WAV was itself made from an MP3 or a streaming download, the detail it lost is gone for good. A higher bitrate only stores the damaged version more faithfully.
- Converting back to WAV does not restore quality. The WAV made from an MP3 is ten times larger but sounds exactly like the MP3.
- A very long recording is slow or fails. An hour of WAV is over 600 MB and is held in memory while it converts. Cut it into parts first, or convert it on a computer rather than a phone.