Convert FLAC to WAV on iPhone
Both formats are lossless, so nothing is lost — you are simply unpacking compressed audio into an uncompressed container that every tool on earth can read. It will be a lot bigger.
This is a genuinely lossless conversion
FLAC is compressed but lossless. It stores your audio in less space and decodes back to the exact same samples, bit for bit — the way ZIP returns your document unchanged, not the way MP3 returns an approximation.
So converting FLAC to WAV is not a quality decision at all. You are decompressing. The samples in the WAV are the samples that were in the FLAC, which were the samples in whatever master the FLAC was made from. Nothing is degraded, nothing is approximated, and there is no bitrate or quality setting to agonise over — because there is nothing to trade.
What changes is size. FLAC is typically 40–60% smaller than uncompressed audio, so expect the WAV to be roughly two to two-and-a-half times larger than the FLAC you started with.
Why anyone would unpack a perfectly good FLAC
Compatibility, always. FLAC is technically excellent and politically unpopular in certain corners:
- Editors, samplers and DAWs that import WAV and shrug at FLAC. Still common, especially in older or more specialised software.
- Hardware. Loopers, groove boxes, field recorders, CDJs and a lot of embedded audio kit read WAV off a card and nothing else.
- Apple's Music app, which will not take FLAC into its library at all — though note that WAV is a poor library format too, and M4A is the better answer if listening is the goal.
- Scientific, forensic and transcription pipelines that were written against WAV a long time ago and are not going to change now.
- Anything that needs instant seeking — an uncompressed file has every sample at a computable byte offset, with no decoding to do.
If your goal is simply to play the FLAC on an iPhone, you may not need this at all. iOS decodes FLAC natively — a FLAC in the Files app will play when you tap it. What iOS will not do is take FLAC into the Music app library. Converting to M4A solves that far more sensibly than converting to a WAV several times the size.
What Convexy writes
Convexy writes WAV as 32-bit floating-point PCM — the format modern editors and DAWs work in natively, with generous headroom for gain and processing. Your FLAC's audio values are carried across exactly; a 16-bit or 24-bit integer source is represented precisely in 32-bit float, with no rounding.
The size consequence is worth stating plainly: a 32-bit float WAV is twice the size of a 16-bit WAV of the same audio, on top of the size increase from decompressing the FLAC. A 30 MB CD-quality FLAC can comfortably become a 100 MB+ WAV. Everything is preserved; nothing is compact.
You can preserve the source sample rate or force 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz, and preserve, downmix to mono, or keep stereo. For a straight unpack, leave all of it on Preserve — resampling here would be the only thing in the whole operation capable of altering the audio.
Keep the FLAC
There is no reason to delete it. The FLAC holds the identical audio in half the space, with proper metadata tags and an internal checksum that can tell you if the file has silently corrupted — none of which WAV offers.
Treat the WAV as a working copy: make it when a tool demands it, use it, and let it go. The FLAC is the master.
How to do it
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Bring the FLAC into Convexy
Tap Browse files and pick it from Files or iCloud Drive, or share it into Convexy from wherever it is stored.
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Choose WAV
Convexy lists only what a FLAC can actually become — WAV, MP3, M4A, AIFF and CAF.
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Leave the options on Preserve
There is no quality setting to tune here. Preserving sample rate and channels keeps the conversion exact.
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Convert
Decoding runs on your iPhone or iPad. The output will be considerably larger than the input — that is expected.
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Save or share it
Save the WAV to Files or hand it straight to the editor, sampler or tool that needed it.
Common questions
Does FLAC to WAV lose quality?
No. FLAC is lossless compression — it decodes back to exactly the samples it was given. Converting to WAV unpacks those samples into an uncompressed container. Nothing is approximated and there is no quality setting, because there is no trade-off to make.
Why is the WAV two or three times bigger?
Because FLAC compresses and WAV does not. FLAC typically saves 40–60%, so undoing it roughly doubles the size — and Convexy writes 32-bit float WAV, which doubles it again relative to a 16-bit WAV. The audio is identical throughout; only the packing changed.
Can I convert the WAV back to FLAC later?
Yes, and you will get the same audio back. Lossless to lossless conversions are round-trippable in a way lossy ones never are. That said, if you still have the original FLAC there is no reason to — it already is the master.
Do I need to convert FLAC to play it on my iPhone?
Not to play it — iOS decodes FLAC, and one sitting in the Files app plays when tapped. You need to convert only to get it into the Music app library, which does not accept FLAC. For that, M4A is the sensible target, not WAV.
Why is the WAV 32-bit float rather than 16-bit?
Because it is the format modern editors and DAWs work in, and it guarantees no clipping or quantisation when you process the audio. The cost is size. If you hand the file to a very old tool that expects 16-bit integer PCM, it may refuse it — that is a limitation of the tool, and the audio itself is intact.