Extract audio from a video

Plenty of recordings are videos only because the phone or meeting app recorded video. If you only need to listen, transcribe or edit the sound, an audio file is far smaller and easier to handle.

Which format should I choose?

MP3 is the default and plays everywhere: phones, cars, podcast apps and every editor. It is encoded at 192 kbps, which is clear for speech and good for music.

M4A holds AAC audio at 192 kbps. Apple devices and apps prefer it, and AAC sounds slightly better than MP3 at the same bitrate.

WAV is uncompressed 16-bit audio. Choose it when the sound is going into an audio or video editor, a transcription service that asks for WAV, or anywhere you will process it further. Files are about seven times larger than the MP3.

Does quality drop?

The audio inside a video is almost always compressed already, usually as AAC. Saving it as MP3 or M4A compresses it a second time. At 192 kbps that extra loss is not audible for speech and hard to hear in music. WAV avoids a second lossy step entirely.

Which videos work?

MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI, WMV, FLV, 3GP and MPEG. If a video has several audio tracks, such as different languages, the first track is extracted. A video without any sound gives an error saying so, since there is nothing to extract.

Is it private?

Extraction runs on our server. Your video is uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed in Germany and deleted with the audio file automatically within two hours.

What are the limits?

This counts as a video job: the free tier covers 3 per day without an account and 5 with a free account, for files up to 50 MB. Pro takes files up to 500 MB with no daily cap, and one credit pays for a single job over the limit. A folder of lecture recordings can go through the pipeline builder in one run, followed by Normalize Audio so they all play at the same volume.

How to extract audio from a video

1. Drop your video onto the drop zone.
2. Choose MP3, M4A or WAV.
3. Click Extract audio.
4. Download the audio file.