MyMediaTools

Convert MTS to AIFF — Free Online Tool

Extract and convert the AC-3 or AAC audio track from your AVCHD camcorder footage (.mts) into a full-resolution, uncompressed AIFF file using PCM 16-bit big-endian encoding. Ideal for macOS users who need broadcast-quality audio from Sony or Panasonic camcorder recordings without any lossy compression artifacts.

FFmpeg Command

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Estimated output:

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How It Works

MTS files store audio as either AC-3 (Dolby Digital) or AAC, both of which are lossy compressed formats embedded inside an MPEG-2 Transport Stream container. During this conversion, FFmpeg demuxes the transport stream to extract the audio track, decodes the compressed audio (AC-3 or AAC) to raw PCM samples, then re-encodes those samples as 16-bit big-endian PCM and wraps them in an AIFF container. The video stream is discarded entirely — AIFF supports audio only. Because the source audio is lossy and is being decoded to PCM, the output is uncompressed but the fidelity ceiling is limited by the original MTS audio quality. No additional generation loss is introduced beyond what already existed in the camcorder recording.

What Each Flag Does

Flag What it does
ffmpeg Invokes the FFmpeg binary. In the browser-based version of this tool, FFmpeg runs via WebAssembly (FFmpeg.wasm) entirely within your browser — no file is sent to a server. The same command works identically in a local desktop FFmpeg installation.
-i input.mts Specifies the input file — your AVCHD MTS file from a Sony or Panasonic camcorder. FFmpeg automatically detects the MPEG-2 Transport Stream container and identifies the multiplexed H.264 video and AC-3 or AAC audio elementary streams inside it.
-c:a pcm_s16be Sets the audio codec to signed 16-bit big-endian PCM, which is the standard uncompressed audio format used inside AIFF files. This decodes the lossy AC-3 or AAC audio from the MTS and re-encodes it as raw, uncompressed samples compatible with macOS audio tools and Apple's AIFF specification.
output.aiff Defines the output filename and tells FFmpeg to write an AIFF container. The .aiff extension causes FFmpeg to use the AIFF muxer automatically, which wraps the PCM audio in Apple's Audio Interchange File Format structure — natively recognized by macOS, Logic Pro, GarageBand, and Final Cut Pro without any additional drivers or plugins.

Common Use Cases

  • Extract dialogue or ambient audio from Sony or Panasonic AVCHD camcorder footage for use in a macOS-based audio editing workflow in Logic Pro or GarageBand, which natively support AIFF.
  • Prepare clean uncompressed audio from wedding or event videography MTS recordings for delivery to a client's audio engineer who requires lossless AIFF masters.
  • Strip the AC-3 surround audio track from AVCHD footage captured on a Panasonic camcorder to use as a reference mix in a post-production audio suite.
  • Archive the audio component of historical or archival MTS camcorder recordings in an uncompressed format that will not degrade further with future re-encoding.
  • Pull interview or voiceover audio from MTS footage recorded on set so a sound editor can sync and sweeten it independently from the video in Final Cut Pro or Pro Tools.
  • Convert camcorder audio to AIFF for import into Apple's Compressor or Motion, where AIFF is the preferred uncompressed audio interchange format in macOS professional pipelines.

Frequently Asked Questions

Not in the strictest sense. AIFF stores audio as uncompressed PCM, so no further compression is applied and the output file itself is lossless. However, the source audio in MTS files is already lossy — AC-3 and AAC both discard audio data during encoding in the camcorder. The conversion to AIFF perfectly preserves every sample that survived that original lossy encoding, but it cannot recover what was discarded by the camcorder. Think of it as a lossless snapshot of lossy source material.
MTS files store audio as compressed AC-3 or AAC, which can be 10–20x smaller than uncompressed PCM. AIFF uses raw 16-bit PCM at the original sample rate (commonly 48 kHz for camcorder audio), so a one-hour MTS file with a 192 kbps AC-3 track will produce an AIFF file roughly 15–20 times larger for the audio portion alone. This is expected behavior — the large file size is the cost of having fully uncompressed, ready-to-edit audio.
Yes. FFmpeg automatically detects the sample rate of the audio track in the MTS file — typically 48 kHz for AVCHD camcorder recordings — and uses that same rate in the AIFF output. No resampling occurs unless you explicitly add a resampling flag to the command. The 48 kHz sample rate is standard in broadcast and professional video audio, and AIFF handles it natively.
Replace pcm_s16be with pcm_s24be in the command: ffmpeg -i input.mts -c:a pcm_s24be output.aiff. AIFF supports 16-bit, 24-bit, and 32-bit PCM variants. Since camcorder recordings are typically captured at 16-bit or 24-bit internally, using pcm_s24be is a reasonable choice if your source footage was shot at 24-bit depth — it avoids any bit-depth downsampling. For typical consumer AVCHD footage, 16-bit is sufficient and produces smaller files.
Yes, with a simple shell loop. On macOS or Linux: for f in *.mts; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -c:a pcm_s16be "${f%.mts}.aiff"; done. On Windows Command Prompt: for %f in (*.mts) do ffmpeg -i "%f" -c:a pcm_s16be "%~nf.aiff". This is especially useful when offloading an entire AVCHD memory card where footage is split across many numbered MTS clips, which is common with Sony and Panasonic camcorders.
No. AIFF is a single-stream audio-only format and does not support chapters, subtitles, or multiple audio tracks. FFmpeg will select the first (or best-ranked) audio track from the MTS file by default. If your MTS file contains multiple audio tracks — for example, a main mix and an isolated camera mic track — you can select a specific track using -map 0:a:1 (for the second audio track) before the output filename in the command.

Technical Notes

AVCHD MTS files conform to the MPEG-2 Transport Stream specification, where audio is multiplexed alongside H.264 video in packetized elementary streams. The audio codec is most commonly AC-3 at 192 or 256 kbps for consumer camcorders, though some models use AAC-LC. FFmpeg's transport stream demuxer handles AVCHD MTS reliably, including files split across clips by the camcorder's file system. The output codec pcm_s16be specifies signed 16-bit PCM with big-endian byte order, which is the native byte order for AIFF as defined by Apple's original specification (in contrast to WAV, which uses little-endian PCM). AIFF does not support embedded video, subtitles, chapter markers, or multiple audio tracks, so all of those streams are silently dropped. Metadata such as track title or creation date from the MTS file is generally not preserved in the AIFF output, as AVCHD transport streams embed metadata in a proprietary structure that does not map cleanly to AIFF's ID3-style chunks. For files larger than 4 GB of audio output, standard AIFF has a theoretical size limit inherited from its 32-bit chunk size fields; in practice this is unlikely to be an issue for typical camcorder audio extractions.

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