WAV to MP3
WAV is uncompressed, so a few minutes of audio can run to tens of megabytes and most sharing services will reject it. Converting to MP3 typically cuts the size by around ninety percent while staying perfectly listenable, which is why MP3 remains the format for sending a recording to someone. You pick the bitrate. It is free, needs no account, and adds no watermark to your result.
WAV to MP3
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What happens to your file.
FFmpeg reads the audio from the WAV, whether 16, 24 or 32-bit, floating point, ADPCM or the mu-law of a phone recording, and encodes it to MP3 at your chosen bitrate. MP3 holds at most two channels and 48 kHz, so 5.1 surround is mixed down to stereo and a 96 or 192 kHz master is resampled; otherwise the sample rate and channels stay as they were. The title and artist that Audacity or a recording app wrote into the WAV become the MP3’s ID3 tags. Because the source is uncompressed, this is a single generation of loss rather than a re-compression, so the result is as good as MP3 gets for that material.
Where it stops: MP3 is lossy and the conversion cannot be undone: keep the original WAV if it is a master you may need to edit again. Very low bitrates introduce audible artefacts on music, particularly on cymbals and applause. A WAV that holds only a header and no sound gets a message rather than an empty MP3.
What people use it for.
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Common questions.
How much smaller will the file be?
Roughly a tenth of the size at 128 kbps and about a quarter at 320 kbps. A ten-minute stereo WAV of around 100 MB becomes about 10 MB at 128 kbps.
Which bitrate keeps the quality?
For music, 256 or 320 kbps is transparent to almost all listeners. For speech, 128 kbps is more than adequate and produces much smaller files.
Should I keep the WAV file?
Yes, if it is a master. MP3 discards audio data permanently, so any future editing should start from the WAV rather than from the MP3.
Will the title and artist carry over?
Yes. Tags written into the WAV, as Audacity and most recording software do, become the MP3’s ID3 title and artist.
Can it convert a 5.1 or 24-bit WAV?
Yes. 24-bit, 32-bit float and ADPCM WAVs convert directly, and 5.1 surround is mixed down to stereo, since MP3 holds two channels at most.
You might also need.
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Convert M4A audio to MP3 for broad compatibility across players and devices.
Reduce audio size by re-encoding to MP3 or AAC at a selected bitrate while preserving normal playback compatibility.
Normalize perceived loudness using FFmpeg loudnorm processing for more consistent playback volume.