Convert 3GP to M4A Online
Convert Nokia and Motorola mobile recordings to Apple M4A audio, free, in your browser.
.3gp · up to 100 MB
What it's for
3GP to M4A: Nokia and Motorola memories in the Apple ecosystem
AMR-NB to native AAC
Decodes AMR-NB audio from 3GP and re-encodes to AAC-LC in an M4A container, compatible with the entire Apple ecosystem.
Family archive in iCloud
Recover recordings from Nokia N95, Motorola RAZR and similar devices to preserve them in iCloud Music Library or the Files app.
No servers, 100% private
Your personal recordings are processed locally with FFmpeg.wasm. Never uploaded to any server.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad
The resulting M4A plays on any Apple device from iPhone 3G (2008) to the latest models.
How it works
Three steps, no hassle
Upload your 3GP file
Drag or select the .3gp recorded on your Nokia, Motorola or older phone. Up to 200 MB, no signup.
AMR-NB to AAC conversion in the browser
FFmpeg.wasm decodes the AMR-NB audio from the 3GP container and re-encodes it to AAC-LC in an M4A container. Everything happens on your device, no uploads.
Download the M4A ready for Apple
The resulting .m4a is compatible with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and HomePod, as well as iCloud Music Library.
FAQ
Got questions?
3GP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) was the standard video and audio format for third-generation (3G) mobile phones, defined by the 3GPP consortium in 2001. Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and virtually all mobile manufacturers of the 2002-2012 era used 3GP as the default video recording format. The audio inside these files is typically AMR-NB (Adaptive Multi-Rate Narrowband), a codec designed to compress human voice at rates between 4.75 and 12.2 kbps with very low quality but minimal file size. That's why your recordings from that era — birthdays, family conversations, events — are in .3gp with AMR-NB audio that almost no modern device plays correctly.
The original AMR-NB audio is already low quality (8,000 Hz sample rate, 300-3400 Hz bandwidth, designed exclusively for voice). Converting to AAC-LC cannot recover frequencies that didn't exist in the original recording, but it does produce a correctly formatted AAC file that plays without issues on all Apple devices. For voice files (audio notes, conversations, family records), perceived quality is perfectly acceptable. The goal is not to improve quality but to make the file playable in the Apple ecosystem.
Yes, that's exactly the primary use case for this tool. If you have a collection of videos or audio notes recorded with Nokia N95, N73, E71, Motorola RAZR V3, Sony Ericsson K800i, or other phones from the 2004-2010 era, convert the .3gp files to .m4a and you can import them into Music.app or iPhone's Files app for permanent access from iCloud. Many people have irreplaceable recordings of deceased relatives, their children's first words, or unique events in 3GP that they haven't been able to listen to properly for years.
This tool is specifically designed to extract and convert only the audio from the 3GP to M4A. The video stream (if any) is discarded. The result is a pure .m4a audio file. If you also need to preserve the video, consider converting the full 3GP to MP4, also available at convertir.ai.
Yes. The first Android smartphones (HTC Dream, original Samsung Galaxy S, HTC Desire) also used 3GP as their video recording format. Android 3GP files may contain AMR-NB, AMR-WB (higher quality), or even AAC in later versions. The tool automatically detects the audio codec and uses stream copy if the audio is already AAC or re-encodes to AAC-LC if it's AMR.
Three methods: (1) On Mac, open Music.app and drag the .m4a files directly into the library; they'll be available for automatic sync via iCloud Music Library. (2) On Windows, use iTunes > File > Add to Library to import the .m4a files. (3) From any device, upload the .m4a files to iCloud Drive and open them from the Files app on iPhone for direct playback without synchronisation.
Convert 3GP to M4A: Nokia and Motorola recordings for iPhone and iCloud
The 3GP format was the de facto standard for video and audio recording on mobile phones throughout the first decade of the 21st century. Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and Samsung shipped hundreds of millions of devices that recorded by default in 3GP with AMR-NB (Adaptive Multi-Rate Narrowband) audio, a voice compression codec designed at Ericsson's laboratories in the late 1990s and standardised by 3GPP for GSM and UMTS networks. The low bitrate of AMR-NB (between 4.75 and 12.2 kbps) was ideal for the limited storage of the era's mobile phones — 32 or 64 MB MMC cards — but produces narrowband audio (300-3400 Hz, intelligible voice only) that modern devices, especially the Apple ecosystem, do not play natively. Converting these 3GP files to M4A is the only way to integrate these historical recordings into iCloud Music Library, Apple Music, the iOS Files app, or audio editing workflows with GarageBand and Logic Pro.
The technical conversion from 3GP to M4A involves two operations: first, demultiplexing the 3GP container to extract the AMR-NB audio stream; second, decoding the AMR-NB to PCM and re-encoding to AAC-LC at 44,100 Hz for the M4A container. FFmpeg.wasm, the WebAssembly implementation of FFmpeg that Convertir.ai runs, includes the opencore-amrnb decoder (the 3GPP reference implementation, licensed under Apache 2.0) for this conversion. The process cannot recover audio frequencies above 3,400 Hz that AMR-NB discarded in the original recording, but the result is a correctly formatted AAC file with a 44,100 Hz sample rate that iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and HomePod play natively. For voice recordings — the most common content type in 3GP files from Nokia and Motorola phones — the intelligibility and perceived quality of the resulting M4A are perfectly adequate.
The cultural and historical value of converting 3GP to M4A is hard to overstate. Nokia's N-Series phones (N95, N73, N80) and the Motorola RAZR, along with the first Sony Ericsson Walkman and Cybershot smartphones, were the first devices to democratise video and audio recording among the general public, between 2004 and 2010. The 3GP recordings from that era include the only audio records of deceased relatives, first words of children now grown up, unique family events, and personal historic moments that exist in no other format. Convertir.ai processes these files entirely in the browser via FFmpeg.wasm, with no uploads to external servers, no registration, and no usage limits. The resulting M4A is compatible with all Apple devices manufactured since 2007, with cross-platform players such as VLC and foobar2000, and with automatic transcription platforms for generating text from historical voice recordings.