While QuickTime is mostly used for playing movies, it has a standard audio playback functionality built into it as well. In addition to Music, or iTunes, M4A files also work with QuickTime Player (since they are based on QuickTime File Format), which is one of the default apps you can find in your Applications folder. You can drag and drop any M4A file into Music and it’ll be added to your library. m4a.Īll this leads us to the question of how do you play M4A vs MP3 on Mac and what’s the easiest way to convert file to MP3? How to play M4A files on MacĪs already mentioned above, a lot of the M4A files you’d come across are from the iTunes Store, so naturally you’d be able to play them on iTunes as well (or the Music app from macOS Catalina onward). However, copyrighted songs might also come in the. m4a format? Mostly in Apple’s own iTunes Store, as it’s the default file extension for song downloads, which is then encoded with AAC for reduced file size or ALAC for lossless audio. Their only downside is that M4A players are much harder to find, whereas MP3 is one of the most universal audio formats out there. M4A files, for example, are generally smaller in size and can store audio in better quality than MP3s.

MP4 (also known as MPEG-4) is in turn based on QuickTime File Format (QTFF) and, in some sense, was developed to replace MP3. You might be more familiar with M4A files if you think of them as MP4s, which they essentially are - the only difference is that an MP4 file can handle video while.

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