Video to MP3
Pull the sound out of a video file and keep it as an MP3.
Your file
Drop a file here, or click to choose
It stays on this device. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Settings
Bitrate to pick
The audio inside a video is usually AAC at 128 to 192 kbps. Encoding to MP3 at 192 kbps keeps essentially everything that is there. Going to 320 kbps does not add anything, you cannot get back what the video's encoder already discarded, it just makes a bigger file.
For a lecture, podcast or interview, 96 kbps is plenty and produces a file a third of the size.
Why this finishes so much faster than a video conversion
A video file holds two streams sitting side by side, and they are independent. This job discards the video stream without ever decoding it, then decodes the audio and re-encodes it as MP3. Since the pictures are where essentially all the data and all the work live, an hour-long recording is usually done in well under a minute. Nothing here is proportional to resolution, so a 4K file extracts no more slowly than a 480p one of the same length.
Which formats this reads
MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI, FLV, TS, MPG, 3GP and most things you are likely to have. The rule of thumb is that if VLC opens it, this reads it. The audio inside is usually AAC, sometimes Opus or Vorbis in a WebM, sometimes MP3 in an older file, and all of them are handled without you having to say which.
The exception worth knowing is AC-3 and E-AC-3, the surround formats used on discs and some broadcast recordings. Those are not in this build, so a rip with a 5.1 track may come back silent. Media info names the codec, which turns a mystery into a one-line answer.
When MP3 is the wrong target
Most video already carries AAC audio, and MP3 is a second lossy encode on top of it. One hop at a sensible bitrate is inaudible, so this is fine for ordinary use. But if you are extracting audio to edit it, or if the destination will take anything modern, choosing M4A on the extract audio tool copies the AAC stream out without re-encoding it at all. That is genuinely lossless: the exact bytes that were in the video, in a file your player will open. It is the better choice whenever compatibility is not the reason you came.
MP3 remains right for car stereos, older hardware, DJ software, phone systems and anything that has not been updated in a decade, which is a large enough category to keep it the default.
Common questions
Which video formats work?
MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI, FLV, TS and most others. If a player opens it, this almost certainly reads it.
Can I rip audio from a YouTube video?
Only from a file already on your device. There is no server here to fetch a URL.