Convert HEVC to ALAC — Free Online Tool
Extract and convert audio from HEVC/H.265 video files into ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) .m4a files, preserving audio fidelity without any lossy compression. ALAC stores audio in bit-perfect quality inside an MPEG-4 container, making it ideal for archiving or using extracted audio within Apple's ecosystem.
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FFmpeg Command
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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
This conversion strips the audio stream from an HEVC (.hevc) source file and re-encodes it using Apple's lossless ALAC codec, outputting an .m4a container file. Because HEVC is a video-only raw stream format with no standardized embedded audio, the tool targets whatever audio is present and transcodes it to ALAC — a lossless codec, meaning no audio quality is lost in the encoding step. The video stream is discarded entirely, since ALAC/.m4a is a pure audio format. The output file will be decodable bit-perfectly, reproducing the original audio signal exactly.
What Each Flag Does
| Flag | What it does |
|---|---|
ffmpeg
|
Invokes the FFmpeg tool, which handles all the demuxing, decoding, encoding, and muxing steps required to extract audio from the HEVC stream and write it as an ALAC .m4a file. |
-i input.hevc
|
Specifies the input file — a raw HEVC elementary stream containing H.265 encoded video. FFmpeg will demux this file to locate any audio stream present before discarding the video. |
-c:a alac
|
Sets the audio codec to ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec), encoding the extracted audio stream without any lossy compression so that the output waveform is bit-for-bit identical to the source audio. |
-c:a alac
|
This flag appears twice in the resolved command, which is redundant but harmless — FFmpeg will apply ALAC encoding as instructed. In practice, a single -c:a alac is sufficient to produce the lossless .m4a output. |
output.m4a
|
Defines the output file as an .m4a container — the standard Apple MPEG-4 Audio file format — which FFmpeg populates with the ALAC-encoded audio stream extracted from the HEVC input. |
Common Use Cases
- Extracting the lossless audio score or soundtrack from an HEVC-encoded film master for archival in iTunes or Apple Music library
- Pulling a high-quality audio track from an H.265 video interview or lecture to use in an Apple Podcast workflow or GarageBand project
- Archiving the original audio from HEVC home videos into a lossless format that can be stored alongside still photos in an Apple Photos-compatible collection
- Converting HEVC video game capture audio to ALAC for use in Apple Logic Pro, preserving every detail for audio post-production
- Preparing audio extracted from HEVC broadcast recordings for distribution on iTunes, which natively supports ALAC .m4a files
- Creating a lossless audio backup from an HEVC drone footage clip before lossy distribution edits are made
Frequently Asked Questions
No — ALAC is a lossless codec, so the audio data in the output .m4a file is a bit-perfect reproduction of whatever audio was present in the HEVC source. There is no lossy compression step in the audio encoding. The only 'loss' is that the video stream from the HEVC file is permanently discarded, since ALAC/.m4a cannot store video.
HEVC files often contain heavily compressed audio (such as AAC or AC-3), which is compact but lossy. When that audio is transcoded to ALAC lossless, the output can be significantly larger because ALAC stores the full uncompressed audio waveform rather than a perceptually coded approximation. This is expected behavior and reflects the nature of lossless encoding.
ALAC in an .m4a container does support chapter markers and standard metadata tags such as title, artist, and album. However, raw .hevc stream files typically carry minimal or no metadata, so there may be little to transfer. If your source had embedded tags, they may not survive this conversion intact — you may want to add metadata manually after conversion using a tool like MusicBrainz Picard or Apple Music.
ALAC is an open standard and is supported beyond Apple's own ecosystem. VLC, foobar2000, and many Android devices can play ALAC .m4a files natively. However, some older or budget media players only support the lossy AAC .m4a variant, so compatibility is not universal. For maximum device support, you may prefer to convert the audio to FLAC instead.
You can use a shell loop to apply the same command to many files. In Bash on macOS or Linux, run: for f in *.hevc; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -c:a alac "${f%.hevc}.m4a"; done. On Windows Command Prompt, use: for %f in (*.hevc) do ffmpeg -i "%f" -c:a alac "%~nf.m4a". Each file will be processed sequentially, producing a matching .m4a output per input.
The video stream is completely dropped. The FFmpeg command targets only the audio stream (-c:a alac) and writes to an .m4a container, which is audio-only. No video re-encoding takes place, and no video data is written to the output — this is an audio extraction and transcode, not a video conversion.
Technical Notes
Raw .hevc files are elementary video streams containing only H.265 encoded video data with no container wrapper, meaning audio is not guaranteed to be present at all — some .hevc files have no audio track whatsoever. If no audio stream is detected, the FFmpeg command will fail or produce an empty output. ALAC itself is a lossless intra-frame codec developed by Apple and open-sourced in 2011; it achieves compression ratios typically between 40–60% compared to raw PCM, making it far more space-efficient than WAV/AIFF while remaining bit-perfect. The .m4a container is an MPEG-4 Audio container and natively supports iTunes metadata fields including track number, album art, BPM, and lyrics. One known limitation is that .m4a/ALAC does not support multiple audio tracks — only a single stereo or multi-channel stream can be stored, so if the HEVC source had multiple audio tracks, only the default track will be encoded. This tool does not carry over HEVC HDR metadata or color space information, as that is irrelevant to a pure audio output.