Extract the audio from a video

Drop a video and get its soundtrack back on its own. Choosing M4A keeps the original audio untouched — it is lifted out of the container rather than re-encoded — so the result is bit-for-bit what the camera or the microphone recorded.

    • Where it runs

      A video is read in the browser. Nothing is uploaded.

    • No queue, no account

      It starts the moment you drop the file, and it never asks who you are.

    • No watermark

      What comes out is the file you made, with nothing added to it.

    How it works

    1. Drop a video onto the box above, or press it to choose one.
    2. Pick a format. M4A keeps the original audio exactly; MP3 and WAV re-encode it.
    3. Press Extract audio. Everything runs on your own machine.
    4. Download the sound on its own.

    M4A is the one that keeps the original

    The audio inside an MP4 is almost always AAC, and an M4A is an MPEG-4 container holding exactly that. So choosing M4A copies the audio across without a decoder ever seeing it: no quality is lost, and it finishes in about a second whatever the length of the video.

    MP3 and WAV cannot hold AAC, so those two decode the sound and encode it again. MP3 costs a generation of quality; WAV costs none but produces a file roughly ten times the size, because it stores the samples raw. Pick MP3 for a phone, WAV for editing, M4A when you simply want the sound as it was.

    What "extracting" actually removes

    The picture is discarded, which is usually the entire point — a one-hour lecture drops from a gigabyte to about thirty megabytes with nothing lost that you were going to listen to.

    Chapter marks, subtitle tracks and any second audio language do not come across. If a film has an English and a German track, this takes the first one. That is a limitation worth knowing before you use it on something dubbed.

    Why this is not the same as the conversion pages

    Quinvert also has pages for specific pairs — MP4 to MP3, MOV to WAV and so on — and they do the same work. This page exists because the question arrives differently: somebody with a video does not always know or care what container it is in, and they want the sound out of it.

    So this one takes any of the five common video containers and lets you choose the destination afterwards, where a pair page decides both for you. Neither is better; they answer different sentences.

    Extract the audio from a video: common questions

    Does extracting the audio lose quality?

    Not if you choose M4A. The original AAC track is lifted out of the container without being decoded, so it is identical to what was in the video. MP3 re-encodes and costs a generation; WAV re-encodes without loss but produces a much larger file.

    Is my video uploaded?

    No. The audio is separated inside your browser and neither the video nor the sound leaves your device. Lecture recordings, interviews and voice notes are the usual input here, and all three are things people should not have to hand to a website.

    Which format should I choose?

    M4A if you want the sound exactly as it was and your player accepts it, which nearly all do. MP3 if it has to work on something old or awkward. WAV if you are taking it into an editor and will process it further.

    Why is the M4A so much faster than the MP3?

    Because it is not doing the same work. M4A copies the existing audio across, so the time is however long it takes to read the file. MP3 has to decode every sample and encode it again, which is real work proportional to the length of the video.

    What if the video has two languages?

    You get the first audio track. This page does not offer a choice of track, so a dubbed film will give you whichever language the file lists first — worth checking before you rely on it.

    Other tools