Video to Audio

A recorded talk, an interview, a lecture, a voice memo filmed rather than recorded — plenty of things arrive as video when only the sound matters. Extracting the audio makes the file a small fraction of the size and lets you listen to it the way you would anything else.

Three formats. MP3 plays on absolutely everything and is the safe answer. M4A sounds better than MP3 at the same size and is what Apple devices produce by default. WAV is uncompressed and enormous, and is only worth it if the audio is going into an editor.

Worth understanding what extraction can and cannot do. The audio inside a video is already compressed, so pulling it out re-encodes what is there rather than recovering anything. A higher bitrate does not improve the recording — it only stops the extraction losing more on top. A hundred and ninety-two kilobits is comfortably enough for anything that was in a video in the first place.

Everything runs in your browser using a WebAssembly build of ffmpeg served from this site. Nothing is uploaded, which matters when the video is a meeting recording, an interview or a lecture.

One thing worth saying plainly: extracting audio from a video you did not make and do not have permission to use is copyright infringement, whatever a tool makes technically possible. This one works on files you already have, and nothing more.