Convert 3G2 to ALAC — Free Online Tool
Convert 3G2 mobile video files to ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec), extracting the audio track from your CDMA-era mobile media and re-encoding it as a bit-perfect lossless M4A file compatible with iTunes, Apple Music, and the broader Apple ecosystem. This conversion upgrades your audio from the lossy AAC or MP3 compression typical in 3G2 containers to fully lossless ALAC storage with zero quality degradation.
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FFmpeg Command
Copy this command to run the same conversion locally with FFmpeg on your desktop. Download FFmpeg
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Settings
Note: Browser-based encoding uses approximate quality targets. For precise CRF compression, copy the FFmpeg command above and run it on your desktop.
Estimated output:
Conversion Complete!
DownloadHow It Works
During this conversion, FFmpeg opens the 3G2 container and reads its audio stream, which is almost certainly encoded as AAC (the default audio codec for the 3GPP2 format). That audio is then fully decoded to raw PCM and re-encoded using the ALAC codec, then wrapped in an MPEG-4 container saved as an M4A file. Because ALAC is lossless, the output faithfully represents every sample of the decoded audio — however, since the original 3G2 source used lossy AAC compression, the output is a lossless copy of already-lossy audio; any quality loss introduced by the original 3G2 encoding is already baked in and cannot be recovered. The video stream from the 3G2 file is discarded entirely, as ALAC is a pure audio format.
What Each Flag Does
| Flag | What it does |
|---|---|
ffmpeg
|
Invokes the FFmpeg program. In this browser-based tool, FFmpeg runs via WebAssembly (FFmpeg.wasm) entirely in your browser — the same command shown here can also be run in your local terminal if FFmpeg is installed on your desktop. |
-i input.3g2
|
Specifies the input file, a 3G2 container holding mobile video and audio encoded for CDMA network transmission. FFmpeg will demux this container to access the individual audio (and video) streams inside. |
-c:a alac
|
Instructs FFmpeg to encode the audio stream using the Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC). The source audio (typically AAC from the 3G2 file) is fully decoded to PCM and then re-encoded as ALAC, producing a lossless representation of the decoded audio in the output M4A container. |
-c:a alac
|
A duplicate of the preceding flag present in this resolved command. It has no additional effect since both flags specify the same ALAC codec — FFmpeg applies the last value, which is identical. When running this command locally, you can omit this second instance without changing the output. |
output.m4a
|
Defines the output filename with the .m4a extension, which signals FFmpeg to use an MPEG-4 audio container. This container is the standard packaging for ALAC audio and is what makes the file natively recognizable by iTunes, Apple Music, and other Apple software. |
Common Use Cases
- Archiving audio from old 3G2 videos recorded on CDMA mobile phones (e.g., early Verizon or Sprint devices) into a durable lossless format that will remain playable as mobile standards evolve
- Importing the audio from 3G2 video clips into an Apple Music or iTunes library, where ALAC is natively supported and enables lossless playback on iPhone or iPad
- Extracting voice memos or recorded conversations that were saved as 3G2 files and preserving them in a high-fidelity, lossless archive format for legal or personal records
- Recovering the audio track from 3G2 concert or event clips captured on older handsets to use in audio editing software like GarageBand or Logic Pro, which integrate natively with ALAC in M4A containers
- Stripping video from 3G2 files to produce smaller, audio-only M4A files suitable for syncing to Apple devices without consuming video storage space
Frequently Asked Questions
No — and this is an important nuance. The audio inside a 3G2 file is almost always encoded with lossy AAC compression, which discards audio data permanently during the original encoding on the mobile device. Converting to ALAC creates a lossless copy of that lossy audio, meaning no additional quality is lost in this conversion, but the quality ceiling is still limited by what AAC preserved. Think of it as putting a lossy original into a lossless vault: the vault is perfect, but the content inside already reflects the original compression.
3G2 files were designed for CDMA mobile networks where low bitrate was critical, so they used aggressive AAC compression to keep file sizes tiny. ALAC, by contrast, uses lossless compression that preserves the full decoded audio waveform. Even though ALAC compresses efficiently, a lossless audio file will always be significantly larger than a lossy one at the same sample rate. Additionally, the 3G2 file contained a video stream; the output M4A contains only audio, so while the audio portion grows, the video data is dropped.
The video stream is completely discarded. ALAC is a pure audio codec and the M4A output format in this configuration carries no video track. If you need to preserve the video, this is not the right conversion — you would want to target a video output format like MP4 instead. This tool is purely for extracting and losslessly archiving the audio content of your 3G2 file.
Yes. Apple developed ALAC specifically for its ecosystem, and M4A files containing ALAC audio are natively recognized and played by iTunes, Apple Music on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS, and Apple's AirPlay stack. The format also supports metadata tags such as title, artist, and album art within the MPEG-4 container, though metadata from the original 3G2 file may be sparse or absent since 3G2 was not designed with rich tagging in mind.
The displayed command processes a single file, but you can batch-convert on your desktop using a shell loop. On Linux or macOS, run: for f in *.3g2; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -c:a alac "${f%.3g2}.m4a"; done. On Windows Command Prompt, use: for %f in (*.3g2) do ffmpeg -i "%f" -c:a alac "%~nf.m4a". This iterates over every 3G2 file in the current directory and produces a matching ALAC M4A output for each one.
That is a minor redundancy in the resolved command — specifying '-c:a alac' twice has no harmful effect because FFmpeg processes codec flags sequentially and the last valid value wins, but in this case both are identical so the result is the same as writing it once. If you copy this command to run locally, you can safely remove the duplicate flag and use: ffmpeg -i input.3g2 -c:a alac output.m4a, which is the cleaner canonical form.
Technical Notes
3G2 containers are closely related to the MPEG-4 Part 12 container family (sharing DNA with MP4 and M4A), which means FFmpeg can demux them reliably even for files produced by obscure CDMA handsets from the mid-2000s. The default audio codec in 3G2 is AAC-LC at low bitrates (often 32–128 kbps), though some devices used AMR-NB for voice and a small number used MP3. If your 3G2 contains AMR audio, the ALAC re-encode will still work — FFmpeg will decode AMR to PCM before encoding to ALAC — but the output will reflect AMR's narrow telephony bandwidth (typically 8 kHz sample rate), resulting in noticeably thin audio quality. ALAC itself supports up to 32-bit depth and 384 kHz sample rate, far exceeding anything a 3G2 source could provide, so the format is not a bottleneck. The resulting M4A file supports chapter markers as an MPEG-4 container feature, though 3G2 sources will not carry chapter data to transfer. Metadata tags (ID3-style fields embedded in the MPEG-4 atoms) may carry over if present in the source, but 3G2 files from mobile devices typically contain minimal or no metadata beyond creation timestamp.