File Extension .M4a

The M4A file extension is largely linked with MPEG-4 Audio Layer. Files with an M4A file extension then are audio layer files of MPEG4 (non-video) movies. This file extension has become so extensively used and rather popular that it was predicted to become the new standard for audio file compression. For Mac users, this format or file extension is also known as Apple Lossless or Apple Lossless Encoder which is actually a new codec that was designed to grant lossless encoding in surprisingly less storage space.

M4A actually stands for “MPEG-4 Audio” and files with this file extension contain audio data encoded using the popular MPEG-4 Part 14 multimedia container format. Originally, this file extension was created and introduced by Apple Inc for the purpose of differentiating multimedia types encoded using MPEG-4 especially with the fact that MPEG-4 produces a specific file extension known as MP4.

These audio data files with M4A file extension can also be compressed using various algorithms that includes but is not limited to AAC, MP3, MP2, CELP, TwinVQ, SAOL and so much more. Because of this fact, several audio players support this file extension as well and can therefore open this file including Winamp, Apple Quick Time and these other programs in the list: