Playing Wav Files On Iphone

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Zamzar Pro Tip: Pretty much all modern media players will play WAV files. The M4R is an iPhone ringtone file that is essentially a renamed AAC (m4a) file. Introduction: Every audiophile is always wondering how to play flac on iPhone – It’s a fact that Apple made it where the only way you would be able to listen to audio files from your iPhone is to add the songs or files into your iTunes beforehand. Apple also made it so iTunes can only support, transfer and play certain audio file types.

Wav Files On Iphone 7

There is a misconception that the iPhone only supports the AAC format and can only play audio purchased at the iTunes Store. In fact, the iPhone supports many different audio formats. Whether you are using a current iPhone or turning an older iPhone into the equivalent of an iPod touch, you end up with a powerful music player.

So What Caused the Confusion?

It is true that any music you download to your iPhone from iTunes is in the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format. It isn't the AAC format you might find elsewhere, though; it is a protected or purchased version of AAC. However, you may have music in iTunes that came from other sources, and that music is most likely to be an MP3 or another format. iTunes can play your MP3s and other formats just fine. So, if you rip a CD to your computer or buy music online in other formats, you can play it on your iPhone, as long as it is in one of the formats that iOS supports on Apple's mobile devices.

iPhone Audio Format Specifications

Learning about the audio formats that the iPhone supports is important if you want to start using your iPhone as a portable media player. It matters when the contents of your music collection come from different sources — like a mix of online music services and ripped CD tracks, digitized cassette tapes, or vinyl records, all of which are legal to copy into iTunes if you own the original recording. If this is the case, there's a good chance you have a mix of audio formats.

Supported audio formats are:

  • AAC-LC:ACC Low Complexity is a lossy audio format optimized for streaming audio and low-bitrate applications.
  • HE-ACC and HE-ACC v2:Both High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding versions are lossy compression formats good for software media players, streaming music, and internet radio. V2 has a few more features than the original version. HE-ACC files are also called MPEG-4 ACC files.
  • ACC Protected:All songs sold on iTunes before 2009 are in ACC-protected format, a lossy format that includes Digital Right Management (DRM). You can't burn these to CDs.
  • ACC Purchased:All songs sold on iTunes after 2009 in iTunes + format do not include DRM. The format is lossy.
  • Apple Lossless: This lossless format delivers no quality loss of music tracks at all. It is similar to the FLAC format.
  • FLAC:This Free Lossless Audio Codec format provides lossless compression of digital audio. When FLAC files are decompressed, the audio is identical to the original.
  • Linear PCM:This audio data format is often used on audio CDs. The data is not compressed, so the files are large, but the quality is good.
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  • MP3:MP3 is a lossy audio format and the most popular of the audio types used for digital music.
  • Dolby Digital (AC-3): Dolby Digital is a lossy audio compression format that carries up to six channels of music.
  • Dolby Digital Plus (E-AC-3): Dolby Digital Plus is an enhanced version of Dolby Digital that offers increased bitrates and support for more audio channels.
  • Audible formats 2, 3, and 4:Developed by Audible, the spoken word company, lossy format 2 delivers 8 kbps of sound, on a par with AM radio. Format 3 at 16 kbps delivers sound equal to that of an FM radio, and format 4, with a bitrate 32 kbps, has sound quality comparable to an MP3.
  • Audible Enhanced Audio (extensions AAX and AAX+): Enhanced Audio formats at 64 kbps are deemed to have CD-quality sound. These uncompressed files deliver a sound that is superior to Audible formats 2, 3, and 4. They are larger files than those of the lossy formats.

Not all of these formats are used with music, but they are all supported by the iPhone in one place or another.

Difference Between Lossy and Lossless Compression Formats

Lossy compression removes information from the pauses and blank spaces in an audio recording, which makes lossy files much smaller than lossless or uncompressed files. However, if you are an audiophile and buy high-resolution music online, you aren't going to want to convert it to a lossy format. For most listeners, lossy works just fine, and when you store music on your iPhone, rather than stream it, size matters.

How to Convert Music From Unsupported Formats

If you have music in a format that iTunes doesn't support, iTunes on a computer converts it to an audio file that is compatible when it imports it. By default, iTunes converts incoming files using the ACC format, but you can change the format in iTunes Preferences > General > Import Settings. Your choices affect the quality of the audio and the size of the audio file. For example, if you prefer to listen to audiophile-quality music, change the default to Apple Lossless Encoder. These settings aren't available for iTunes on the iPhone, but you could change your preferences in iTunes on the computer and then sync the music to the iPhone.

Uses for the iPhone and Digital Music

As well as being a great smartphone, there's a lot you can do with the iPhone when it comes to listening to audio files. For starters, the iPhone makes a stellar portable media player that plays audio, videos, podcasts, and audible books. You may have already synced the iPhone with your iTunes music library or with your music on iCloud and listened to your songs on the go. The iPhone can also be used to access Apple's streaming music subscription service Apple Music, while apps like Spotify and Pandora supply an almost unlimited supply of music.

Golden ears of the world, unite! While other people are happy with the incredible convenience that listening to MP3s and AACs on an iOS device offers—thousands of songs, anytime, anywhere—audiophiles decry the lower quality that comes as part of the bargain.

If you crave sound quality on a par with (or even better than) a CD but still require the freedom that comes from carrying a bunch of music on your iPhone or iPad, it’s time to look at lossless audio.

A quick compression primer: Lossy compression formats such as AAC and MP3 take up less storage space than standard CD audio does, but if you listen carefully you might notice that something is lost in translation. It’s usually the low-end and high-end frequencies that are sacrificed in the name of smaller file size.

You could opt for uncompressed audio—AIFF or WAV files that are an exact copy of the song on a CD—but the files become so large (about 10MB per minute) that they make storage space a real concern.

That’s where lossless compression comes in. Lossless formats such as Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) and Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) are still larger than MP3 and AAC formats, but they tilt the quality/size balance in favor of sound quality. In lossless compression, the codecs use algorithms that shrink the file size but allow the original to be reconstructed exactly. You end up with no quality loss, and lossless files are 40 percent to 60 percent the size of uncompressed CD files (still a fair bit larger than lossy MP3 or AAC files, though).

How to listen to lossless audio on iOS

Listening to lossless files on an iOS device can be seamless or may require a bit more effort, depending on your choice of lossless format.

Apple’s Music app for iOS natively supports the company’s own ALAC format. To listen to ALAC files, just transfer them to your iOS device via iTunes, as you would with files downloaded from the iTunes Store or other music you’ve ripped to your computer. The files appear in the Music app with the rest of the music on your device.

If you prefer FLAC—a common format for live and classical music downloads—you’ll need to download an app such as the free VLC 2.1 for iOS or Dan Leehr’s $10 iOS 7–only FLAC Player. Onkyo also recently released HF Player, a free EQ app that includes a $10 in-app purchase to enable FLAC and other high-resolution audio-file playback.

With any of these apps, you’ll need to manually transfer the files to your iOS device. Connect the device to your Mac, launch iTunes, and select the device in iTunes’s source list on the left. Click the Apps tab and scroll down to the File Sharing section. Click the app you want to use, and drag your music files into the documents list to the right (or click the Add button to choose the files via the Finder). Your files will transfer immediately, and you should be able to play them through your selected app on your iOS device. (They won’t appear in the standard Music app.) Alternatively, you can stash files in Dropbox and then choose to open them in an app such as VLC, although you have to download and open each track individually.

What Audio Files Can Iphone Play

Up the ante with high-resolution audio

If CD quality isn’t good enough for your ears, you can raise the resolution even higher with lossless formats.

With digital audio, analog sound waves need to be translated to digital information. The amount of raw information included in a file depends on both the bit depth and the sample rate. The bit depth describes how much data is used for each sample of audio: 16-bit audio offers 65,536 bits, while 24-bit audio captures 16.7 million bits. The more bits, the more accurately the digital signal approximates the analog signal it represents. A CD has 16 bits per sample, for example, while a Blu-ray DVD uses 24 bits per sample. Likewise, the sample rate indicates how often the analog sound wave, which is continuous, is sampled in a given time period. CDs use a 44.1-kHz sample rate; Blu-ray ups it to 48 kHz. But some files include sample rates of 96kHz or 192kHz—and some people believe the extra information makes a difference in how good the resulting audio sounds. Whether you can tell the difference depends on the equipment you’re using, how good your ears really are, and how good the source material is to begin with.

To obtain a true high-resolution file, you have to start with a source that offers higher resolution than a CD—ripping a file from a CD into, say, a 24-bit, 96kHz FLAC file won’t add anything. You can also buy high-resolution digital files from sources such as HDTracks. Of course, the more information you add, the bigger the file becomes. A 24-bit, 96kHz FLAC version of Sonny Rollins’s song “St. Thomas” fills up about 143MB of space. (Whereas lossless audio has become a bit more mainstream, high-resolution audio is being pushed by the audio industry but remains a hard sell.)

Apps such as VLC for iOS and Onkyo HF Player can play high-resolution files, but there’s a catch: What you can hear on your iOS device is limited by its headphone jack, which is capable of reproducing only CD quality (16-bit, 44.1kHz). Even AirPlay is limited to CD-quality audio (although it can handle 24-bit and 48kHz for video).

To unleash the fidelity of high-resolution audio files through your iOS device, you need a specially designed external digital-to-analog converter. Unfortunately, few DACs are designed to work with iOS devices. V-moda’s $598 Vamp Verza is one option; Astell & Kern will soon release the $300 AK10 portable DAC, which connects directly to your device’s Lightning port and enables 24-bit, 96kHz playback. Other USB DACs, such as Audio Engine’s $189 D3 24-bit DAC, aren’t made to connect directly, but you can use Apple’s $29 Lightning to USB Camera Adapter in between.

It remains up for debate whether high-resolution audio makes any difference when you’re listening through headphones. If you’re using Apple’s stock EarPods or any basic headphones, you’re unlikely to detect the difference. But if you’re listening through a higher-end pair, you very well may be able to hear the extra bits and samples. Only your ears can say for sure.