The only downside is that M4A players are challenging to find, but native applications on both Mac and Windows will play MP3. Some believed QTFF would replace MP3 as it progressed into the MPEG-4 (or MP4), which combined improved audio and video capacity with even smaller file size than MP3.įiles without the video component are M4A - still with improved audio quality and smaller file size.
M4A files didn’t develop from MP3s but the QuickTime File Format (QTFF). Since the nineties, people have listened to MP3s, but music playback has had some improvements in the past 30 years. It’s still the most widely used audio file format because of the combination of high quality and small file size. To explain what M4A files are and how to play them, let’s start with the most popular music file format, the MP3.
