Your Company's Most Valuable Knowledge Might Be Sitting in an Audio File

Digital storage is a magical place. There are hidden jams all over the place. A recording of an engineer explaining how to fix an equipment failure. An employee recorded a training session, maybe, complete with answers to questions that new hires are still asking today. The info is out there. Finding and using it is another matter.

Even the technical details can get in the way all the time. A large recording may be inconvenient to share until someone thinks to fire up Convertio and convert wav to mp3 for easier distribution. Other files are scattered across phones, personal laptops, and meeting platforms. Before anyone can learn from them, somebody brave and true must find them, check what they contain, label them for easy revision, and make them accessible.

Research says businesses have considerable room for improvement in this field of ‘knowledge management’.

Companies Are Losing Knowledge They Can’t Easily Replace

A 2025 survey by the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC), which involved 1,000 respondents, found that only 30% of organizations capture knowledge from departing retirees most of the time or always. Another 41% rarely or never do so. The biggest reported obstacles were lack of time (52%), insufficient resources (45%), and low organizational priority (38%).

How much expertise is lost when an experienced employee leaves? Of course, companies can and do document different procedures, they maintain training manuals, but written instructions are not always enough.

Recorded interviews and demonstrations are a way to preserve some of the experience for new hires in a budget-friendly way. So, businesses can convert audio into compatible formats, keep them in internal systems, transcribe conversations, and organize the resulting information for future employees.

The APQC survey found that 74% of organizations use person-to-person knowledge transfers and 62% rely on manual documentation. Only 21% of respondents in the relevant survey group reported using AI to extract knowledge from conversations.

Recording an experienced employee explaining their work might not be high on the priority list, but it IS a practical option worth considering, especially when that explanation includes examples and decisions that conventional documentation may lack.

Why Is Recorded Info Overlooked?

Why is this option overlooked? Because recordings are often stored without any consistent system. Let’s say employees record customer interviews using smartphones. You can already smell the chaos. One uploads to a shared drive, another keeps them in a messaging app, and someone else saves meeting recordings to their personal work account. Say, a few months later, when someone needs to retrieve a customer's explanation of a recurring problem, no one can find anything. Recording? What recording? Dozens of files to examine. Very little indication of which file has the discussion they need.

Also, what if you have different recording formats? And we all do, by the way. Smartphones often record in M4A, other recording tools may have WAV or MP3 files. When an application or established workflow requires MP3, an m4a to mp3 converter from Convertio can prepare a compatible copy without requiring dedicated desktop conversion software.

But format is one side of the story. Searchability is also a problem. File names, dates, speaker identification, project references, and transcripts are equally important.

Microsoft Teams claims to have a solution to this. Its recording and transcription features allow it to store meeting recordings and their transcripts in OneDrive or SharePoint. Under organizational settings and access permissions, of course. But then again (with transcription on), employees can search the written record and find specific parts of a conversation.

Same goes for

recorded training sessions,
interviews with departing specialists,
customer feedback,
technical demonstrations

Consistent organization and searchable transcripts. That’s the key.

NOTE: Always verify transcripts before relying on them! Automated speech recognition can misinterpret technical vocabulary, names, figures, and discussions involving multiple speakers.

Audio Formats Matter More Than You Think

Long-term storage and everyday distribution are not one and the same. The Library of Congress Recommended Formats Statement says uncompressed audio is the way to go and specifies that Broadcast WAVE with embedded metadata is its preferred digital audio format.

If you are new to the whole concept, the mentioned ‘uncompressed’ choice is not an accident, but it is a little privileged. Uncompressed PCM audio keeps the original digital audio data without the losses. But here’s the rub: who has the storage?

One hour of uncompressed stereo WAV audio recorded at 48 kHz and 16-bit resolution needs a home of around 691 MB.
An hour of MP3 audio encoded at 128 kbps, on the other hand, needs approximately 58 MB. That’s a large difference if you have hundreds of those recordings.
A sensible approach is to keep the original, where preservation is justified, and create smaller listening copies when necessary.

Convertio supports WAV-to-MP3 conversion, along with adjustable settings including bitrate and audio channels. It also handles other common audio conversion requirements that come up when employees use different recording devices and software.

NOTE: Converting previously compressed AAC audio, commonly found in M4A files, into MP3 does not restore lost information. Because both formats use lossy compression, additional quality degradation is possible.

Recordings Become Business Knowledge

Extracting audio archives is what makes maintaining the information they contain possible.

1. Decide which conversations deserve to live on. A routine scheduling call? Not much. An interview with an employee responsible for a critical production process? Sure.

2. Making the information retrievable. How?

descriptive title,
recording date,
subject,
responsible department,
access permissions,
transcription.

3. Turning findings into working documents. Say, a troubleshooting guide from a recorded conversation with an experienced engineer. Or updated maintenance instructions, or a training resource.

4. Periodic review. A perfectly preserved explanation of a business procedure may become misleading after equipment, regulations, or company policies change.

5. Mind privacy concerns! Commercially sensitive information should always be protected. Using external audio-processing services also requires checking company policies and the provider's data-handling terms. Not every business recording should be uploaded to an online converter, transcription platform, or other third-party application.

Preserving files and preserving knowledge are not the same activity.

Businesses already possess valuable recordings that could help train employees, explain past decisions, improve procedures, and preserve specialist expertise. What they need is a reliable process for identifying that information, preparing it for practical use, and ensuring the right people can retrieve it.

An audio file cannot replace an experienced employee. But a carefully managed archive may preserve explanations that would otherwise disappear when that employee leaves.