Audio Compressor
Hand over any audio file and choose how aggressively to compress it. Three tiers...Hand over any audio file and choose how aggressively to compress it. Three tiers let you balance file size against listening quality, and the result d...
Drop an audio file here or click to browse
MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG, AAC, FLAC, WebM, up to 100 MB
Ideal for podcasts, presentations, and everyday sharing. The sweet spot between size and quality.
At a Glance
Why Use Audio Compressor?
Cut File Size by Up to 90% Without Wrecking the Sound
A raw WAV recording from a decent microphone eats about 10 MB per minute of stereo audio. That adds up fast. A five minute voice memo is 50 MB, a ten minute interview is 100 MB, and a full hour of meeting audio pushes past 600 MB. Run any of those through the compressor and the file shrinks dramatically. The Gentle tier keeps things sounding rich, the Balanced tier trims more aggressively while staying clean for speech and casual listening, and the Maximum tier strips the file down to its bare essentials. The encoder uses psychoacoustic models that were developed over decades of hearing research, identifying which parts of the audio your ears genuinely perceive and which parts get masked by louder sounds happening at the same moment. Everything your brain would have ignored anyway gets removed, and the result sounds the same through earbuds, car speakers, laptop audio, and phone speakers.
Three Compression Levels Built for Specific Situations
Gentle runs at 192 kbps and preserves the full frequency range of music, vocals, and complex arrangements. It works for anything you plan to listen to on good headphones. Balanced compresses to 128 kbps, which is the sweet spot for podcasts, voice recordings, and audio that will be played through phone speakers or earbuds during a commute. Maximum drops to 64 kbps, pushing the encoder as hard as it goes, and works surprisingly well for solo voice content like lecture recordings, meeting notes, and dictation where you care about the words, not the sonic texture. Each level exists for a reason. Pick based on what the audio contains and where it will be played, not based on a number you have to guess at.
Get Audio Files Under Email Attachment Limits on the First Try
Gmail allows 25 MB attachments. Outlook caps at 20 MB. Yahoo holds at 25 MB. A short voice memo recorded on an iPhone saves as M4A and can easily hit 15 MB in a couple of minutes. A WAV exported from a recording app blows past every limit before you finish a single sentence of narration. The frustrating part is that most email services quietly reject oversized attachments without telling the sender. The message appears to send but never arrives. Compressing your audio before attaching it eliminates this problem entirely. A two minute recording at the Balanced tier comes out under 2 MB, leaving plenty of room for other attachments in the same email.
Processing Finishes in Seconds, Not Minutes
The compression happens on fast servers running optimized encoding software. A five minute audio file typically processes in two or three seconds. Even files close to the 100 MB upload limit finish within ten to fifteen seconds depending on your connection speed. There is no queue, no waiting room, no countdown timer. You upload the file, pick your compression level, press the button, and the result appears with full statistics showing original size, compressed size, and the percentage you saved. The inline audio player lets you preview the result immediately so you can decide whether to download or try a different level.
Accepts Six Audio Formats Without Any Manual Conversion
Drop an MP3, WAV, FLAC, OGG, M4A, or AAC file and the compressor handles it. WAV and FLAC are the formats you get from professional recording equipment and digital audio workstations. MP3 is what most people have in their music libraries. M4A is what every iPhone voice memo and Apple recording saves as. OGG shows up in browser recordings and open source tools. AAC appears in various streaming and broadcasting contexts. You do not need to convert anything before uploading. The server reads whatever you give it, decodes the audio internally, and encodes the compressed MP3 output from the decoded audio stream.
MP3 Output That Works on Literally Every Device
The compressed file downloads as MP3, the most universally compatible audio format ever created. It plays on every phone, every tablet, every laptop, every desktop computer, every car stereo manufactured in the last twenty years, every smart speaker, every media player application, and every web browser. You will never send someone a compressed file and get the reply asking what program they need to open it. MP3 just works. Everywhere, always, without exception.
Your Files Stay Private and Get Deleted Automatically
Audio files get uploaded over an encrypted connection and processed on an isolated server. The original upload and the compressed output are both automatically purged within sixty minutes. Nobody at YaliKit listens to, reviews, or stores your recordings. The files never get used for training anything, never get added to any dataset, never get analyzed beyond what is needed to compress them. Upload a confidential meeting recording or a personal voice memo with the same level of confidence you would have processing it on your own computer.
Situations Where Compression Pays Off
Getting Audio Attachments Past Email Size Limits
Gmail blocks anything over 25 MB. Outlook stops at 20 MB. Yahoo holds at 25 MB. A raw voice memo or interview recording in WAV format can exceed these limits after just a couple of minutes. The worst part is that oversized attachments often fail silently, the email appears to send but the recipient never gets the file and nobody knows until someone follows up days later. Compressing the audio before attaching it drops a two minute recording from 20 MB to under 2 MB at the Balanced tier, fitting comfortably within every provider's limit with room to spare.
Cutting Podcast Hosting Costs and Listener Data Usage
Podcast hosting platforms charge by the gigabyte. A weekly show running sixty minutes per episode at 192 kbps generates about 86 MB per episode, adding up to over 4 GB per year. Compressing episodes to 128 kbps before uploading reduces annual storage by roughly a third without any audible difference on earbuds or phone speakers. Listeners on metered mobile data plans also benefit because they download smaller files per episode, which matters when a good portion of podcast consumption happens over cellular connections during commutes and workouts.
Freeing Up Storage From Large Music and Recording Libraries
A collection of 500 FLAC files averaging 300 MB each takes up 150 GB. For tracks you listen to casually, converting to 192 kbps MP3 through the Gentle tier shrinks each file to roughly 30 MB, reclaiming over 80 percent of that storage. Keep the lossless versions for your absolute favorites and production reference tracks, then compress everything else. The quality difference on workout playlists, background music, and commute listening is genuinely undetectable.
Making Website and App Audio Assets Load Faster
Background music loops, notification sounds, UI feedback tones, and ambient audio on a website all contribute to page load time. A single uncompressed WAV sound effect can weigh as much as an entire page of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript combined. Compressing audio assets to MP3 at the Maximum tier reduces their footprint by up to 90 percent. That directly improves page speed scores, reduces server bandwidth costs, and makes the site feel faster for visitors on slow connections.
Sharing Audio on WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, and Telegram
Messaging platforms have file size limits. WhatsApp caps at 16 MB for media, Discord limits free accounts to 25 MB, and Slack allows larger files but throttles upload speed on free plans. Compressing a recording before sharing ensures it arrives quickly and completely. The Maximum tier is particularly effective for messaging because audio plays through tiny phone speakers where the quality difference between 64 kbps and 192 kbps is genuinely imperceptible.
Embedding Smaller Audio in Presentations and Course Materials
PowerPoint, Google Slides, and Keynote all embed audio directly into the presentation file. A single uncompressed narration track can inflate a slide deck from 5 MB to 50 MB, making it impossible to email, painful to upload to a learning management system, and slow to open on a projector laptop. Compressing the narration to 128 kbps keeps spoken words perfectly clear while keeping the total file size manageable for sharing and distribution.
Creating Lightweight Backups of Audio Archives
Organizations that record meetings, interviews, customer calls, and training sessions accumulate enormous amounts of audio over time. Compressing archival copies to 128 kbps reduces long term storage costs by 80 to 90 percent while keeping the recordings fully searchable and playable. The originals stay in cold storage for legal or compliance requirements while the compressed copies serve daily retrieval and quick reference.
Clearing Space on Phones Running Low on Storage
The average phone carries hundreds of megabytes of audio across voice memos, downloaded podcasts, saved songs, and messaging voice notes. On devices with 32 or 64 GB of total storage, that audio competes with photos, apps, system updates, and everything else demanding space. Compressing infrequently accessed recordings from their original formats to MP3 at Balanced frees 60 to 80 percent of that space without actually deleting any content.
How It Works
Upload Your Audio File
Drag a file from your computer into the upload area or tap to browse on your phone. The tool accepts MP3, WAV, FLAC, OGG, M4A, and AAC files up to 100 MB. Once the file loads, you will see its name, size, and a playback button so you can confirm it is the right recording before doing anything else.
Choose Your Compression Level
Pick Gentle for music and anything going to good headphones, Balanced for podcasts and everyday sharing, or Maximum for speech recordings where file size matters more than high frequency detail. A short description under each option explains the trade off in plain language so you know exactly what to expect.
Compress, Check the Numbers, Download
Press Compress and wait a few seconds. The result card shows the original size, the compressed size, a visual bar showing the savings, the exact percentage reduction, and how many megabytes you trimmed. Use the inline audio player to listen to the compressed version, then download the MP3 if you are happy with it. If the savings are minimal, the tool tells you the file was already well compressed and suggests trying a lossless source instead.
Get the Cleanest Results
Preview Through the Speakers Your Audience Actually Uses
After compression, play the result through the headphones, earbuds, or speakers that the final listener will use. A podcast sounds perfectly clean on AirPods but might reveal subtle artifacts on flat response studio monitors. The tool includes an inline audio player in the result card, use it before deleting the original.
Start With Gentle and Only Increase If the File Is Still Too Large
Begin with the Gentle tier and check the resulting file size. If it is still too large for your use case, try Balanced. Only move to Maximum when you need the absolute smallest file and the content is primarily speech. This approach avoids compressing harder than necessary and preserves as much quality as possible.
Always Compress From the Original Lossless Source When You Have It
If you have the original WAV or FLAC recording, feed that into the compressor rather than an MP3 derived from it. One clean encoding pass from lossless to lossy produces a measurably better result than re encoding an already lossy file, because each generation of lossy compression adds cumulative artifacts that stack on top of the previous pass.
Back Up the Original Before You Compress Anything
Lossy compression permanently removes audio data and no algorithm can reconstruct it afterward. Before shrinking a file, copy the original to a backup drive, cloud folder, or external storage. That way you can always re compress at a different quality setting later without suffering from generational loss.
Consider Converting Stereo Speech to Mono Before Compressing
If the source is a stereo recording of a single speaker, converting to mono first halves the data and gives the encoder twice the per channel bit budget at any given bitrate. Speech is inherently mono content, and stereo adds file weight without adding useful spatial information. The Audio Trimmer tool and most audio editors can handle the conversion in one step.
Trim Silence and Dead Air Before Uploading
Long stretches of silence at the beginning or end of a recording add unnecessary weight. Use the Audio Trimmer to cut the recording down to the section that contains actual content. A tighter file compresses faster, stays within upload limits more easily, and produces a cleaner final result.
Read the Stats Card Before You Download
The result card shows original size, compressed size, percentage saved, and bytes saved. If the savings are below five percent, the tool flags it with a warning. This means the source was already well compressed and further reduction is not going to give you meaningful gains. Trust the numbers rather than compressing blindly.
Chain With Other Audio Tools for a Complete Workflow
For the tightest possible file, trim silence with Audio Trimmer first, then compress here. For video workflows, extract audio with Video to MP3, compress here, and use the result wherever needed. For podcasts, record, compress, upload to hosting. Chaining tools together lets you optimize every step without installing desktop software.