Introduction
Both LHA and ZIP are archive file formats, designed to make your files take less space on the disk. However, they are quite different from one another. LHA is an obscure archive format created in 1988. Though it has never achieved much popularity, it is still occasionally used in Japan, the homeland of its developer. Amiga computers also used this format back in the day, so retro-computing hobbyists have some use for LHA as well. But nowadays, few programs support this format. ZIP, on the other hand, is a very popular archiving format. Thanks to its open-source nature, it was quickly adopted by many file archival programs and became the de-facto standard for compressing files. It holds the title to this day. Though there are many technical differences between the formats as well, this is the most important thing for an average user. Many programs and operating systems support ZIP, but almost nothing works with LHA. As such, a converter app may come in handy. Read our article to learn which LHA to ZIP converter for Mac is the best.
What is the best LHA to ZIP converter for Mac?
WinZip Mac
The best LHA to ZIP converter on Mac is undoubtedly WinZip. It is a powerful archive manager program that is available on both Mac and Windows. It supports many archive file formats, including LHA, and has many powerful features. It allows you to view files inside archives without extracting them, protect your archives with a password, and upload them into cloud. The Pro version also includes support for making file backups and automatically adding watermarks. But even if you aren’t interested in these features, you should know that WinZip Mac can be used to extract LHA files and convert LHA to ZIP. The process is both simple and fast, which is why WinZip is the best LHA to ZIP converter for Mac.
Various online converters
There are several websites online that can convert LHA to ZIP, and vice versa. We do not truly recommend any of them, as they have many issues. The most obvious one is privacy; any site that offers to convert your files may be secretly storing or analyzing them. Thus, you should not use these sites to convert archives containing sensitive data. The conversion will also take longer, especially if you have a slow internet connection.
Nonetheless, such converters still have their place; for example, if you just need to convert one file and don’t want to install any programs. Not all of them are trustworthy, but here’s a few that are more trustworthy than most.
Convertio
Convertio is a versatile converter website that can convert many files, LHA and ZIP included. It can convert files located on your computer, as well as in your Dropbox and Google Drive accounts. It can also reverse the procedure by converting ZIP to LHA. Despite all of this, Convertio is not very useful; free users are limited to converting files up to 100 MB in size, which is nothing when it comes to archives.
CloudConvert
CloudConvert is an alternative to Convertio that has several advantages. For one, it provides you with an option to specify the archive’s password, thus allowing you to convert encrypted archives. Additionally, it can be used to convert archives up to 1 GB in size, which is far better than Convertio’s restrictive limtation. However, it does not support ZIP to LHA conversion.
Converting the archive manually
One simple way to convert LHA to ZIP on Mac, as well as on Windows, is to do it manually. That is to say, unpack your LHA archive into a folder, then compress the resulting folder as a ZIP archive. Any specialized program will essentially perform the same steps, so it is not necessary to use a dedicated converter app. However, due to LHA’s obscurity, you may find it difficult to find an archiver program that supports it. In this case, we recommend using WinZip Mac.
Also, consider this: if you are trying to convert LHA to ZIP so that you could extract it afterwards, creating a ZIP archive is not necessary at all. You can simply extract the LHA file itself and be done with it.
Conclusion
The best LHA to ZIP converter for Mac is a program called WinZip Mac. It works with other formats as well; for example, it can convert RAR to ZIP.
If you don’t want to install a program, you may use a website to convert LHA to ZIP instead. However, these websites have limited functionality, and have obvious privacy issues.