MKA file format (.mka)

What is an MKA file?

In short: An MKA file (.mka) is an audio file in the MKA format. MKA is an MKV with no video track: a container that will hold any audio codec, any number of tracks, with chapters and attachments. It can be converted to MP3, WAV or FLAC for free in a web browser with iHateFiles, without uploading it.

The audio-only form of Matroska, from the same 2002 project.

MKA is an MKV with no video track: a container that will hold any audio codec, any number of tracks, with chapters and attachments. It is used for audiobooks with chapter marks and for albums kept as a single file with cue points.

What MKA is good at

• Any codec, any number of tracks
• Real chapter support, which suits audiobooks
• Open and unencumbered

Where MKA falls short

• Very little player support
• No browser support
• The contents are unpredictable from the extension alone

When to use MKA

Convert MKA to M4A or MP3 to play it anywhere ordinary.

How to open a MKA file

VLC, MPV and Foobar2000.

The thing that usually goes wrong

An MKA can hold anything, so what you get from converting depends on the codec that was inside it.

Inside a MKA file

MKA is the Matroska container carrying audio and nothing else. It is the same file structure as MKV — the same EBML element tree, the same chapter and attachment support — with the video track simply absent. That is why a player which handles MKV will nearly always handle MKA, and why one that has never heard of Matroska cannot open either.

The reason people meet it is almost always a rip. Tools that extract the soundtrack from a Blu-ray or a concert DVD default to MKA because it can hold multi-channel DTS or TrueHD losslessly alongside chapters, which MP3 and M4A cannot. The file then refuses to open on a phone, and the search that brings people here begins.

What matters when converting is that MKA is a container, not a codec. The audio inside might be FLAC, might be AC-3, might be Opus. Converting to MP3 always works but always re-encodes; if the contents are already FLAC, extracting them without re-encoding preserves the original exactly.