Converting M4A to MP3.  Help needed.

I have over 12,000 songs in my library. About half of my songs were imported in mp3 format. The other half are AAC audio files. My goal is to have all of my songs in mp3.
So, I started to 'convert' the AAC files to mp3 using the right click in iTunes. Then I noticed something. Let's say the original m4a file for a certain song was 4.56MB. Now, after it's been converted to mp3 the file has doubled in size to 9.12MB. Even though I deleted the orginal m4a. What is going on? How can convert all my songs to mp3 and not have any of the data left of the m4a?
Thank you so much

Sounds like you are using a much larger bit rate for importing MP3 tracks than AAC tracks. For example, normally, AAC files default to a bit rate of 128kbps unless you go into the import preference and pick a higher custom rate. Likewise, you can change your import preference to MP3 and pick different rates, 128, 160, 192, 256, etc.
In general, AAC files are a bit smaller than the SAME bit rate MP3 track, so a 128-AAC should be a bit smaller than a 128-MP3. But for the sake of argument, let's say they are the same size. If you imported a lot of AAC files at 128 and are not using an import MP3 setting of 256 kbps, then the MP3 files will be roughly twice the size as the AAC files.
So first thing to check is what bit rate are the AAC files you already have and what bitrate you are now using for MP3 files. If the MP3 bit rate is much larger than the AAC bit rate, then you will get much larger files sizes.
Cheers,
Patrick

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