The best Apple Music Converter can vary based on user needs, including ease of use, conversion speed, output quality, and supported formats. When you transcode audio from one lossy format to another, there's an inevitable decrease in sound quality. This is because these codecs are designed to remove parts of the audio that are deemed inaudible to most people, with each conversion process potentially losing more information. Therefore, it's recommended to leave these files in their original format whenever possible.
The .m4a AAC files provided by Apple are encoded using a highly efficient lossy codec, developed as a successor to the MP3 format to address some of its inherent issues. This newer codec was created by the original developers of MP3 to rectify some of the limitations that were hard-coded into the MP3 standard.
In the past, there might have been compelling reasons to convert files from Apple's music service, but this is less the case today. Apple's AAC format is now widely recognized and adopted by numerous international and industry standards bodies, including MPEG, ISO, ITU, and EBU, making it a prevalent format for distributing music to consumers.
Should you find the need to convert your audio files, ffmpeg is a versatile tool capable of handling nearly any audio conversion task through its command-line interface. For those less comfortable with command-line operations, several graphical user interfaces (GUIs) exist, though opting for a specialized audio conversion software might be simpler and more straightforward.
