Extract audio from a video
Pull the sound out of any video file, optionally just the section you need.
Your file
Drop a file here, or click to choose
It stays on this device. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Settings
Ripping only a section
Set start and end times to lift just the part you want, a single song out of a long recording, or one answer out of an interview. Leave the end blank to run to the finish.
About quality
The audio inside a video is already compressed, usually AAC at 128 to 192 kbps. Extracting to MP3 re-encodes it, which loses a small amount. To avoid that entirely, choose M4A, for most MP4 files the audio is already AAC, so this is the closest thing to a straight copy. Choose WAV or FLAC if the file is heading into an editor.
M4A is the option most people should take
It is worth labouring this because the default instinct is MP3 and it is usually the worse choice. The audio in an MP4, a MOV or most MKV files is already AAC, which is exactly what an M4A holds. Choosing M4A lifts that stream out without decoding or re-encoding it, so the file you get contains the identical bytes that were in the video. Nothing is lost, and it finishes almost instantly because no encoder runs at all.
Choosing MP3 instead decodes that AAC and re-encodes it as something else. One hop is not audible, so this is not a disaster, but you are spending time and a generation of quality to get a format that is only better in one respect: what will open it. Take MP3 when the destination is a car stereo, an old player, DJ software or a phone system. Take M4A the rest of the time.
Speed, and why resolution does not matter
This is one of the quickest jobs on the site because the video stream is discarded without being decoded. There are no pictures to process, so a two hour 4K recording extracts about as fast as a two hour 480p one; only the length and the audio bitrate affect the time. If a job here is slow, it is the length of the file rather than its size.
Lifting one section out
Setting a start and end time reads only that range rather than processing the whole file and discarding the rest, which makes pulling one song out of a two hour set or one answer out of a long interview genuinely fast. Times take m:ss or h:mm:ss, decimals included. Leave the end blank to run to the finish.
For finer work on the result, including fades so an excerpt does not begin and end with a click, trim audio cuts to the millisecond. If the sound is too quiet, change volume can normalise it to a sensible level, and it will read a video file directly, so you can level before extracting rather than after.
When the result is silent
Either the video has no audio track, which media info will confirm in a second, or it carries a codec this build does not decode. The usual culprit is AC-3 or E-AC-3, the surround formats used on discs and some broadcast recordings.
Common questions
Which format keeps the most quality?
FLAC and WAV lose nothing further, but they cannot restore what the video's encoder already discarded. M4A is usually the most faithful practical choice.
Can I extract audio from a YouTube link?
No. Everything here works on files you already have on your device; there is no server to fetch a URL with.
The video has two audio tracks. Which one do I get?
The first one. Selecting a specific track is not exposed in this tool.