Why turn an MP3 into a WAV
WAV holds plain PCM samples with no compression, so almost every audio program opens it instantly. Audacity, Reaper, Logic, Pro Tools, Premiere and DaVinci Resolve all import WAV without decoding anything first. If you plan to cut, clean up or mix a recording, starting from WAV avoids the small delay and the occasional glitch that comes from decoding MP3 on import.
Speech tools are the other common reason. Many recognition engines, voice assistants and research scripts expect WAV at 16 kHz mono, and some refuse MP3 outright. Pick 16 kHz and mono in the settings and the output matches that expectation with no extra step.
A few people also need WAV to burn an audio CD. CD audio is 44.1 kHz, 16-bit stereo, which is exactly what you get when you leave the sample rate at 44.1 kHz and the channels as they are.
An honest note: WAV does not add quality
MP3 is lossy. When the file was encoded, the parts of the sound that listeners are least likely to notice were removed for good. Converting MP3 to WAV writes those remaining samples out uncompressed. It does not bring back anything the encoder threw away, and it will not make a 64 kbps MP3 sound like a studio master.
What you do get is a file that will not lose any further detail. Every time an MP3 is decoded and encoded again as MP3, a little more is lost. WAV stops that chain. Edit the WAV as much as you like, and export to MP3 only once, at the end, when you need a small file for sharing.
Choosing the sample rate and channels
The converter writes 16-bit PCM and lets you choose two things: the sample rate and whether to keep stereo or fold the audio to mono. Here is how to decide.
- Same as source: keeps whatever the MP3 used, almost always 44.1 or 48 kHz. Choose this when you are not sure. Nothing is resampled, so this is the cleanest option.
- 44.1 kHz: the CD standard and the usual rate for music projects and podcasts. Pick it when the WAV is going onto a CD or into a session that already runs at 44.1 kHz.
- 48 kHz: the standard for video. Pick it when the audio will be laid under footage in Premiere, Final Cut, Resolve or a similar editor, so the editor does not have to resample.
- 16 kHz: what many speech recognition tools and voice assistants expect. The file is about a third of the size of a 48 kHz file. It is fine for speech and not suitable for music.
- Mono: mixes the two channels into one. Speech tools usually want mono, and it halves the file size. Keep stereo for music or anything with deliberate left and right placement.
How big the WAV will be
Because WAV stores every sample, the file grows a lot. One minute of 44.1 kHz 16-bit stereo takes roughly 10 MB, so an hour-long MP3 of 60 MB becomes a WAV of around 600 MB. At 16 kHz mono the same hour is closer to 110 MB. Check that you have the disk space before converting a long file, and prefer 16 kHz mono when the WAV is only going to feed a speech tool.
Very long files are fine on a desktop or laptop up to about 2 GB of output. Phones and tablets manage less, because the browser has less memory to work with. If a conversion fails on a phone, try it again on a computer.
The conversion happens in your browser
This converter is FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly, running inside the page you are looking at. Your MP3 stays on your device. It is never uploaded, and nothing about it is stored on our side. The first time you use it, the browser downloads the conversion engine, about 32 MB, and caches it. From then on the converter also works with no internet connection.
The output keeps the original file name with a .wav extension. A Download button saves it to your device. The result lives only in the open tab, so download it before you reload or close the page. There is no sign-up and no watermark, and you can convert as many files as you like, one at a time.
Current Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari 16 or newer are supported. The converter only accepts files from your device, so a link to a YouTube or TikTok page will not work.
If you actually need the words
Many people convert MP3 to WAV because a speech tool asked for it. If what you really want is a transcript, skip that step. After the conversion, press Transcribe this file and the WAV goes straight into the transcription box further down this page. That part runs on our servers, so the file is uploaded for processing. You get a timestamped, editable transcript in 90 or more languages, and you can export it to TXT, DOCX, PDF, SRT, VTT or CSV. You can try it without an account.