What audio files can Android play?

Last reviewed: October 29, 2026 · Markdown version

Android publishes the list itself, in a table of what "the Android platform" supports (Supported media formats, Android Developers, read 29 October 2026). It is written by codec, which is not how most people meet a file, so below it is turned around: start from the ending on the file you have.

By file ending

Ending	On Android's list as	Note from the table
`.mp3`	MP3	"Mono/Stereo 8-320Kbps constant (CBR) or variable bit-rate (VBR)"
`.m4a`, `.aac`	AAC (inside MPEG-4, or raw ADTS)	"ADTS raw AAC (.aac, ADIF not supported)"
`.wav`	PCM/WAVE	"8- and 16-bit linear PCM"
`.flac`	FLAC	"Mono/Stereo (no multichannel)", decoding since Android 3.1
`.ogg`	Vorbis, or Opus (Opus decoding since Android 5.0)	An Ogg file can hold either codec
`.amr`, `.3gp`	AMR-NB, AMR-WB	The narrow-band rate is "sampled @ 8kHz"
`.mid`, `.xmf`, `.rtttl`, `.ota`, `.imy`	MIDI and ringtone formats	"Support for ringtone formats RTTTL/RTX, OTA, and iMelody"

Two version notes from the same table are worth knowing: MP3 and FLAC inside an .mp4 or .m4a container are marked "Android 10+", and xHE-AAC needs "Android 9+".

What the list leaves out

Three endings people often ask about, .wma, Apple's lossless ALAC and .aiff, do not appear in the audio table at all; on them it is silent (Supported media formats, read 29 October 2026). That does not settle whether your phone plays them, because Google adds: "a particular mobile device might support additional formats or file types that are not listed in these tables". It also means that only the table's own entries are promised on every phone; anything else depends on the maker or the player app.

When a file will not play

Check the full name in a file manager. If the ending is not in the table above, the phone may simply not have a decoder for it.
Try a different player app. Our view: when common music refuses to play, the player app is the likelier cause, not Android, since the platform list above covers the usual formats.
If the file came from a computer, convert it there to MP3 or AAC (.m4a), the two most widely listed formats.

Videos are a separate table on the same Google page, covered on our video formats page.

Which of these Adinand Auto File Sorter calls Audio

Its Audio category is narrower than Android's list: four endings, mp3, wav, aac and m4a, read from the file name and never from inside the file. A .flac, .ogg, .opus, .amr or .mid sitting in Download still gets sorted, but into Others. If you keep a lot of one of those, a Pro custom rule can send that extension to a folder of your own, for example a folder called FLAC.