OneTaskBy Tim King · Updated
Extract Audio From Video
Rip the Soundtrack From an MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV as MP3 or WAV
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How the Extract Audio From Video works
Use this to extract audio from video in your browser. Drop in a video and get its soundtrack as an audio file. Drag the range handles to keep just the part you want, optionally mix to mono, and export as MP3 or WAV. The video is decoded by your browser, so a large file is not a problem and nothing leaves your machine.
Extract audio from video: getting a good result
The audio inside a video file is an ordinary audio stream — AAC in most MP4 and MOV files, Opus or Vorbis in WebM, sometimes MP3 or PCM — packed next to the picture. Browsers can decode those streams without any help, and this page asks the browser to decode the audio track only, ignoring the video entirely. That is why it copes with files far larger than a typical upload limit: the picture is never touched.
What formats work. Anything your browser plays: MP4 and M4V, MOV, WebM, and MKV or 3GP where the browser supports them. Chrome and Edge decode AAC, MP3, Opus, Vorbis, FLAC and PCM tracks; Firefox the same minus some AAC profiles; Safari handles AAC, MP3 and PCM. If the browser cannot read the track the page tells you so rather than producing silence.
Trimming. The waveform shows the full soundtrack. Drag the two handles to choose the section to keep, or type start and end times. Only that section is exported, so pulling a thirty-second clip from a two-hour recording is quick.
Fades. A short fade at each end — twenty milliseconds by default — removes the click that otherwise appears when a clip starts or ends mid-waveform. Set it to zero when the ends are already silent, or raise it to a second or two for a gentle musical fade.
Mono. Dialogue, lectures and interviews rarely need stereo. Mixing to mono halves the size of a WAV and lets an MP3 sound better at the same bitrate. Keep stereo for music and for anything with deliberate left-right placement.
Choosing the output. WAV is lossless and right if the audio will be edited further or transcribed. MP3 at 192 kbps or above is right for listening, sharing and podcasts; a 128 kbps MP3 of a voice track is about a megabyte per minute. Extracting to MP3 from an AAC track involves one lossy re-encode, which is inaudible at these rates; if that bothers you, choose WAV and keep the file as decoded.
Limitations. DRM-protected video such as downloaded streaming content cannot be decoded. Files with several audio tracks yield the browser's default track, normally the first. Very long files need memory proportional to their length — roughly ten megabytes per minute of stereo — so an hours-long file on a phone may fail to decode.
FAQ
Which video formats can I use?
Any the browser can play: MP4, M4V, MOV, WebM, and often MKV and 3GP. The test is the audio codec inside — AAC, MP3, Opus, Vorbis, FLAC and PCM all work in Chrome, and the page reports a clear error if the browser declines the file.
Does the quality get worse?
Exporting to WAV keeps the decoded audio exactly. Exporting to MP3 re-encodes once, which is inaudible at 192 kbps and above. Either way the result cannot be better than the track in the video, which is usually AAC at 128 to 256 kbps.
Can I take audio from a screen recording or a phone video?
Yes. Screen recordings and phone videos are ordinary MP4, MOV or WebM files and their sound decodes the same way. Phone recordings are often mono already; the stats panel shows the channel count.
Why does a long video take a while to load?
The whole soundtrack is decoded into memory so that the waveform and range selection are instant. A two-hour file is roughly a gigabyte decoded, which takes some seconds and may be too much for a phone browser; a laptop handles it fine.
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