Three formats, three different jobs, and a surprising number of people picking the wrong one on a vague feeling that bigger must be better. The short version: WAV is for making and editing audio, FLAC is for keeping it, and MP3 is for everything that leaves your hands. The rest of this article is the reasoning, the numbers, and the cases where converting between them is worth the trouble.
The one distinction that matters
WAV stores audio as raw, uncompressed samples, usually 16-bit at 44.1 kHz for CD quality or 24-bit at 48 or 96 kHz for studio work. There is no clever maths. It is the biggest of the three and the simplest to read.
FLAC takes those same samples and compresses them losslessly, the way a ZIP compresses a document. Decode a FLAC and you get back every sample bit for bit. It typically lands at 50 to 70 percent of the WAV size.
MP3 is lossy. An encoder analyses the sound, decides which parts your ears are least likely to notice, and throws them away for good. The file is five to ten times smaller than the WAV, and nothing can bring the discarded detail back.
So WAV and FLAC are the same audio in different wrappers, and converting between them loses nothing. MP3 is a different thing entirely: a smaller, permanently altered copy.
How big each one is
The numbers for CD-quality stereo, which is where most music lives:
- WAV: 1,411 kbps, which is about 10 MB per minute. A 60-minute album is roughly 600 MB.
- FLAC: usually 5 to 7 MB per minute. Quiet or sparse recordings compress better, dense and noisy ones worse. The same album is around 350 MB.
- MP3: 128 kbps is just under 1 MB per minute, 192 kbps about 1.4 MB, 320 kbps about 2.3 MB. The album is 60 to 140 MB.
Hi-res WAV at 24-bit and 96 kHz is about 33 MB per minute, which is why anyone keeping a hi-res library ends up on FLAC.
MP3 vs WAV vs FLAC at a glance
| MP3 | WAV | FLAC | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compression | Lossy | None | Lossless |
| Size per minute, CD quality | 1 to 2.3 MB | about 10 MB | 5 to 7 MB |
| Bit depth | Not applicable | 8 to 32-bit | 16 or 24-bit |
| Sample rate ceiling | 48 kHz | Effectively unlimited | 192 kHz and beyond |
| Tags and cover art | ID3, universal | Effectively none | Vorbis comments and pictures |
| Plays on | Everything made since 1998 | Everything | Windows, Android, VLC, the iOS Files app; not the Apple Music app or many car stereos |
| Editing and mastering | Poor | Ideal | Fine, decoded on the fly |
| Best for | Sharing, phones, podcasts | Recording, editing, delivering masters | Archiving, lossless listening |
Tags: the overlooked difference
MP3 carries ID3 tags: title, artist, album, year, cover art, lyrics. FLAC uses Vorbis comments and embedded pictures, and every FLAC-aware player reads them. WAV, in practice, has none. The format technically allows an information chunk, but players mostly ignore it, so a folder of WAVs is a folder of filenames.
This has a practical consequence when converting. Tinyvert carries title, artist, album and cover-art tags across whenever the output format can hold them, which is MP3, M4A, FLAC and OGG. Convert anything to WAV and the tags are gone, not because of a bug but because there is nowhere to put them. Going the other way, WAV to FLAC produces a lossless file with empty tags, which you fill in with a tagger afterwards.
When each format is the right one
WAV: making, editing and delivering
Record and edit in WAV. Editors, DAWs, hardware samplers, broadcast systems and studios all expect it, and because nothing is compressed there is no decode step and no generational loss when you bounce a mix twenty times. It is also the format to hand over when someone asks for “the master”. For short sound effects and jingles the size is irrelevant, so WAV is fine there too.
FLAC: keeping
Rip CDs to FLAC once and treat the result as the permanent copy. It halves the storage against WAV, keeps tags, and includes a checksum of the raw audio in its header so a player can tell if the file has been damaged. Every MP3, M4A or OGG you ever need can be made from the FLAC. If you only keep one copy of a recording that matters, this is the format to keep it in.
MP3: sharing and playing
MP3 is the format every phone, car, laptop, podcast app, smart speaker and web page understands. Its patents expired in 2017, so there is no licensing question anywhere. Use 192 to 320 kbps for music and 64 to 128 kbps for speech. What you should not do is convert an MP3 back to FLAC or WAV expecting quality to return; the detail was discarded at encode time and the bigger file holds exactly the same sound.
Converting between them
The conversions people actually need, and what to expect from each on Tinyvert:
WAV to MP3 with WAV to MP3. The everyday case: a voice memo, a recording from a field recorder, an export from an editor that needs to go to someone. The MP3 is written by the LAME encoder compiled to WebAssembly, and the Bitrate menu runs from 64 to 320 kbps with 192 as the default. The row shows the saving once done, typically around 85 to 90 percent.
WAV to FLAC with WAV to FLAC. The archive case. Encoding is done by libFLAC compiled to WebAssembly and is lossless, so there are no options because none are needed. Sample rate and channel count are preserved.
FLAC to MP3 with FLAC to MP3. You keep the FLAC at home and put the MP3 on the phone, in the car, or on the older device that refuses FLAC. Choose 256 or 320 kbps if storage allows; music with lots of cymbals and reverb shows the bitrate soonest.
MP3 to WAV with MP3 to WAV. Only when something insists: an editor that will not import MP3, a sampler, a phone system, a form that accepts WAV alone. Tinyvert writes 16-bit PCM directly with no encoder, which is also why a 24-bit FLAC converted to WAV comes out at 16-bit, fine for listening and editing but not the file to keep as a hi-res master. Expect the WAV to be about ten times larger, with no tags.
For any other pairing, including OGG and M4A, the Audio Converter has an Output format menu, and Compress Audio shrinks an MP3 that is bigger than it needs to be. The broader question of getting audio out of a video is covered in how to extract audio from a video.
Everything runs inside your browser: the file is read into memory, decoded by the browser’s own decoders and encoded on your device. Nothing leaves your machine and nothing is stored. The audio tools work in Chrome, Edge, Brave and Opera, Safari 17 or newer, and Firefox 130 or newer; large files are limited by your device’s memory. Five files per batch are free, and Pro removes the batch limit for a one-time US$9.
The decision in one paragraph
Record and edit in WAV. Keep in FLAC. Share in MP3. If you are staring at a folder of WAVs wondering what to do, convert a copy to FLAC for the archive and a copy to MP3 for the phone, and only delete the WAVs when the FLACs play. The formats are not competing; they are three stages of the same file’s life.