Handling M4A files? (Waveform 13 Pro)

[DaveL60]

I started on a project for a customer, a narration track for a webinar. To keep things simple several contributors used the Windows Sound Recorder, which outputs M4A files by default. When I try to import Waveform reports that's an unsupported file format. I saw a post elsewhere saying it was also an MP4, so tried renaming a copy with that extension and got the same result.

Do I need to convert M4As to some other format to import into Waveform? If yes, any recommendations for which output format would yield be the highest quality result from an M4A source file (I'll probably do the conversions with Audacity but am open to other recommendations).

Thanks.

[Watchful]

I might be wrong here, but an M4A is already somewhat compressed. I would suggest converting the M4A to a WAV and importing that into Waveform. Waveform can also import .mp3 format, but that's potentially very, very lossy. You won't *improve* the loss going from M4A to WAV, but you won't potentially make it worse.

Anyone is free to chime in if I'm incorrect, here.

[gearwatcher]

M4A is a container format not supported by most DAWs. Almost universally, it means audio content inside is encoded with a lossy codec. Traditionally it would usually mean AAC but lately, especially if you got it by grabbing from Internet streaming, Opus codec is even likelier.

TLDR to avoid future degradation convert to wav.

[Maarid]

I want to add for a note, any audio data format other than Wav will work with errors or flaws in Waveform, whether it's mp3 signal display errors or ogg glitches in effects, in general, work in the editor will be noticeably slower and more unpleasant.