Extract Audio from Video
Extract audio from a video and keep the soundtrack on its own. AAC inside an MP4 is copied across without re-encoding, so the M4A you get back holds the original track untouched.
Runs entirely in your browser — your files and text never leave your device.
Drag & drop your file here, or
M4A (AAC) and Opus are compact and play everywhere; WAV is uncompressed and FLAC is compressed lossless (both larger, best for editing). MP3 export isn't available — see the FAQ.
Working on your device — keep this tab open until it finishes.
Getting the track out
- Put the clip in the Video box at the top. MP4, MOV, WebM and MKV all read fine, and the picture is ignored from that point on.
- Choose one of the four format buttons. M4A is already selected, and it is the one to keep when the source is an MP4 carrying AAC audio, because that combination skips re-encoding entirely.
- Press Extract & download, watch the bar, then play the result in the little audio player that appears before saving it. The file lands as audio.m4a, audio.wav, audio.opus, or audio.flac.
About this tool
The fastest way to extract audio from a video is to not re-encode it at all. Feed in an MP4 or MOV whose soundtrack is AAC, leave the format on M4A, and the audio packets are lifted out of the video container and dropped into an audio one exactly as they were. Nothing is decoded and nothing is compressed a second time, which is why a ten-minute clip finishes almost as fast as you can click.
Ask for WAV, FLAC, or Opus and it does have to decode and re-encode, because those are different codecs from whatever came in. That is the price of a lossless editing file, or of a smaller one. The engine underneath is WebCodecs, the same hardware-backed decoder your device uses for its own camera, so even that slower path moves quickly.
People mostly reach for it to save the song off a clip, to keep the voiceover from a screen recording, or to get an interview they filmed into an audio editor. For the opposite job, Mute Video keeps the picture and throws the sound away.
A gigabyte of interview, kept as twelve megabytes of voice
A twelve-minute interview filmed on a phone arrives as an MP4 pushing a gigabyte, nearly all of it picture. Its soundtrack is AAC at 128 kbps, so with the format left on M4A the extract is a packet copy: the bar crosses in seconds and audio.m4a lands at about 12 MB, the voice untouched because nothing was re-encoded.
Headed into an editor instead? Press WAV and the same track is decoded to raw samples on the way out, well over ten times the size on disk, and the right foundation for cutting and levelling that ends in its own export.
Good to know
- There is no track picker. A file carrying more than one audio track, say a second-language dub, gives you no way to choose between them.
- MP3 is missing from the output list. Encoding it needs a licensed encoder that is not bundled here, so the choices are M4A, Opus, WAV and FLAC.
- A silent video produces nothing, and says so plainly. The tool checks for an audio track before it starts and stops with 'This video has no audio track to extract.' rather than handing over an empty file.
- No trimming. The soundtrack comes out at full length, so if you only want thirty seconds of it, that is a second step in the Audio Cutter.
- Large files lean hard on memory. The output is assembled in a buffer before it reaches you, so a two-hour recording that a laptop swallows without noticing can run a phone out of room.
- Files only, never links. The page reads a clip already on your device and does not fetch from a URL, and what you may save off a streaming site is between you and that site's terms.
Frequently asked questions
What should I use instead of MP3?
M4A. It is AAC audio in an MP4 container, it plays anywhere MP3 plays, and at a matching bitrate it generally sounds better. Every phone, car stereo and podcast app of the last fifteen years handles it.
Does extracting the audio lose quality?
Only when the format has to change. AAC out of an MP4 into an M4A is a straight packet copy, so nothing at all is lost. Ask for WAV or FLAC and the track is decoded and written out losslessly from there; Opus re-compresses it, which is a second lossy step.
Which format should I pick for a podcast edit?
WAV, if the file is going into an editor for cutting and levelling and will be exported again. You do not want a lossy file sitting underneath all that. M4A is the better pick when the recording is already finished and you just need it as audio to publish.
How big will the extracted audio file be?
A phone clip recorded at 128 kbps AAC yields roughly 1 MB of audio per minute, whatever the video itself weighed. WAV goes the other way: uncompressed 44.1 kHz stereo runs about 10 MB a minute, so a half-hour recording lands near 300 MB.
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