How to use the video to audio converter
- 1
Add the video
Choose an MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV file, or drag it onto the box above. The tool tells you what kind of audio the video holds. - 2
Keep the original audio or convert to MP3
Keeping the audio is selected by default where the file allows it. Choose MP3 if the file must play everywhere. - 3
Save the audio file
Press Extract audio, wait for the progress bar and download the file. It keeps the name of your video.
Keeping the original audio
A video file is a container with a picture track and a sound track. Keeping the original audio lifts the sound track out exactly as it is. Nothing is decoded or encoded again, so there is no quality loss, and it is usually much faster than a conversion.
The file type follows the audio that is in the video:
- AAC, common in MP4 and MOV, is saved as .m4a.
- Opus and Vorbis, common in WebM and MKV, are saved as .ogg.
- MP3 is saved as .mp3, FLAC as .flac, and uncompressed PCM as .wav.
- AC-3 and other cinema sound formats are saved as .mka, a Matroska audio file that players such as VLC can open.
A few older formats, such as big-endian PCM in some MOV files, have no audio-only file here. The tool says so and offers MP3 instead. If the sound starts late or has a gap, a kept file holds only the sound itself, so it can run shorter than the video. An MP3 fills that time with silence and stays in step with the picture.
When MP3 is the better choice
Choose MP3 when the file has to work on every device, or when an upload form asks for it. You can pick 128, 192 or 320 kbps. MP3 means the sound is encoded again, so use it for the copy you share and keep the original for your archive. The browser has to decode the audio to do this: Chrome and Safari cannot decode AC-3, so for that sound keep the original. If you only have MP4 videos and want MP3, the MP4 to MP3 converter is the shorter route.
Privacy and limits
The extraction runs in your browser. Your video is read a piece at a time and is not uploaded, so a large video is rarely a problem. The audio file stays in memory until you save it, and it can be up to 1 GB. Keep the tab open while it works.
Copy-protected videos cannot be read. It works in current Chrome and Safari on a computer. Keeping the original audio needs no decoding, so it also runs in browsers that cannot convert to MP3. On a phone, start with a short file. Do you need the spoken words as text? Upload the audio to Spirelight transcription for a draft with speakers and timestamps, which you check against the recording yourself.