Choosing an Audio Converter for Mac OS

Many audio converters exist on the market nowadays for various formats and purposes. However, which criteria is the most important for choosing a converter? Let's consider the most common use case for Mac OS X users: you need to convert audio or video to MP3 to listen to it in iTunes or any other MP3 player or device.

Let's consider some points you need to take into account when choosing a conversion tool.

Number of files for conversion

The choice might depend much on how many files you need to convert to MP3. If it's just a few files, you could save your money and use iTunes built-in tool. That is easy.

However, if you need to convert your entire music or audio collection - it could be an endless and tedious task. Any of audio converters below is an ideal option in such a case – just drop a top-level folder with an unlimited number of subfolders and files to the app icon or window – and that is it. As the outcome, you will have the folder with subfolders intact and converted files in it.

All of our audio converters are proven tools for the conversion of terabytes of the source audio.

Automatic Selection of Settings for output files

If you have lots of files to convert and don’t want to have a headache related to choosing the optimal output settings for quality conversion - the best option is to find a converter which can determine the best Bit Rate, Sample Rate, Channels and Codec for output audios without losing the quality because of resampling or increasing the size of the destination files.

Such a feature becomes extremely important when a huge or just a big audio library is to be converted and transferred to another format.

As an example, To MP3 Converter, makes this task easy - it analyses Bit Rate and Sample Rate of the source audio or video files and applies the most suitable Bit Rate and Sample Rate for output audio files. As a result, you will have MP3 files with maximum possible sound quality and without wasting your hard drive or device space.

All of our audio converters have the feature of automatic selection of settings.

Custom Settings for output files

There are cases, however, when some devices accept only predefined Codec, Sample Rate, or Bit Rate.

Sometimes users need to convert MP3 for specialized hardware or a purpose. As a regular example - the car stereo player, some of them may refuse to play MP3 files encoded with Bit Rate more than 128 kbps.

Another example - is a Business Telephone System accepting only wav files with designated PCM codec, Sample Rate, and Bit Depth.

All of our audio converters give you the full ability to customize settings for nearly all playback devices and apps in an easy and quick way.

Audio Improvements - Effects and Normalization

Nearly all Mac OS X users have music collections grabbed from different sources - iTunes, online music sites, CDs, etc. It means that the volume of music from different sources will have different levels. When converting such files, the best way is to ensure that their output version will have similar or the same volume level.

By default, a Peak Normalization is enabled, which allows using the audio format optimally and at the same time guarantees, there is no distortion in output audio.

However, if you need to equalize perceived loudness (which is different from Peak Level) of output files, you need to apply Loudness Normalization (EBU R128), before the conversion. The typical example - when you need to write to CD some set of your audios, all of them must have the same level of perceived loudness, so you can focus on driving, not changing the volume.

All of our audio converters support both Peak and Loudness normalization and have a similar set of supported sound effects.

Tags Transfer and Management

All of our converters support full tags transfer from source to output files. You also can enjoy better-organized music thanks to loading missing ID3 tags from online databases or local folders and file names.

Supported Input Formats

Support of input formats can be a crucial thing for any audio converter - if the app cannot recognize or a media file, that means no further conversion is possible. Most of our applications support more than 200 input formats, with exception of "MP3 Normalizer" and "MIDI to MP3" which have been designed for specific requirements.

Supported Output Formats

The main point how our audio converters differ from each other is the support of output format. The table below gives more details about it.