What is a .AAC file?
AAC is a lossy audio format that succeeded MP3, offering better quality at the same bitrate.
- Did you know
- AAC was standardised in 1997 as MP3’s successor and is the default for Apple Music, while YouTube serves Opus to most browsers and keeps AAC for its MP4 fallback.
- AAC was first published as MPEG-2 Part 7 and later folded into MPEG-4, where it became the headline audio coder of the standard.
- It was developed by a group including Fraunhofer IIS, Dolby, AT&T, Sony and Nokia, building on the experience gained from MP3.
- Apple chose AAC as the default format for the iTunes Store and the iPod, which hugely accelerated its mainstream adoption.
- On the web a .AAC file is served with the MIME type
audio/aac.
- What Analyser shows you
- Inspect the waveform, spectrogram, codec, bitrate, channels, and tags of MP3, WAV, FLAC, M4A, AAC, OGG, and Opus audio, and play Apple Core Audio (CAF) files such as iMessage voice messages, decoded on-device with FFmpeg where the browser cannot.
- Open a .AAC file
- Drag a .AAC file onto the Analyser home page (or tap to pick one). It opens entirely in your browser - nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and it works offline once installed.