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Common fix · Audio

Get the audio out of a video

By Updated How we write these

2 min read

What you’ll end up with

An audio file of the soundtrack, in whatever format you need.

A lecture you want on your phone, an interview to transcribe, the sound from a recording where the picture is irrelevant: all of them are the same job. Extracting audio is also much faster than converting video, because the picture is simply discarded rather than re-encoded.

What you choose to save as decides whether anything is lost. Extracting to a lossless format keeps the soundtrack exactly as it was in the video; extracting to MP3 re-encodes audio that was already lossy.

What to do

  1. Drop the video in

    The tool reads the file locally and finds the audio track. Nothing uploads, which matters more than usual here — recordings of meetings and interviews are exactly the kind of thing you should not be handing to a conversion site.

    Extract the audio

  2. Pick the format

    MP3 if it has to play on anything. M4A for Apple devices and slightly better quality at the same bitrate. WAV or FLAC if you are going to edit or transcribe it and want no further loss.

  3. Tidy it up

    Long recordings usually benefit from having the silence taken out and the loudness evened up, especially if you are going to listen at speed.

    Even out the loudness

Worth knowing

  • Extracting to MP3 is a re-encode of audio that was already compressed inside the video. At 128 kbps or above for speech, this is not something you will hear.
  • If the video has several audio tracks — a film with more than one language — extraction takes the first one.

Questions

What format should I extract audio to?

MP3 for compatibility, M4A for Apple devices, WAV or FLAC if you plan to edit it afterwards.

Does extracting audio lose quality?

Only if you extract to a lossy format, and then only slightly. Extracting to WAV or FLAC keeps the soundtrack exactly as it was.

Can I extract audio from a large video?

Yes. There is no size limit beyond your device’s memory, and extraction is much lighter work than converting the video itself.

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