Ah ok, sorry. Here's the M4A https://pixeldrain.com/u/2pDTsFXk
The conversion preset was set to 24bit and I didn't bother changing it.
It looks like the M4A files I downloaded from soulseek aren't of the highest quality.
Absolutely no need to apologise @stylesforfree. Sorry if my post came across rather strong. I’m always interested to learn from others and to understand how or why they choose to process audio files in the way that they do. It may be you hadn’t realised that you could go from M4A direct to FLAC without loss of quality hence I thought it worth mentioning. As has been discussed many times on this forum WAV files are merely containers. So if the original M4As were of a lower quality converting them to WAV wouldn’t actually make any difference other than increasing the file size and depending on the method of converting the loss of tags.
The original M4A file was only 96MB. Whereas the WAV format you shared was 531MB more than 5 times the size. Having looked at the M4As they are actually AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) rather than Apple Lossless. Unhelpfully Apple adopt the same file extension for both formats. AAC files are lossy but produce a better sound quality than MP3s at the same bit rate. That’s why the spectral analysis showed frequencies topping 22kHz. Not bad for a lossy file!
The bottom line is that by processing the original AAC files as you have the provenance (as they say in the antiques world) of the original files has been lost. So apart from quintupling the overall file size you now have lossy files masquerading as lossless.
Sorry if it sounds like I’m lecturing you but I wanted to get across the importance of not tinkering with file formats when sharing if it can helped. Even if your intentions were honorable.