How to extract audio from a video file
Turn a lecture, interview, podcast recording or your own voiceover into an audio file — with free tools, and without losing quality.
2 min read · Updated
Sometimes the sound is all you need: a recorded lecture to listen to on a walk, an interview to transcribe, a voiceover you recorded on video. Pulling the audio out of a video file is quick, and done right it loses nothing.
Before you start: which audio is in the file?
Most MP4 files carry AAC audio; most WebM files carry Opus. If you save the audio in the format it's already in — AAC as .m4a, Opus as .opus or .webm — nothing is re-encoded and nothing is lost. Converting to MP3 re-encodes it, which loses a little quality and takes longer.
M4A plays on iPhones, Macs, Android and Windows, so for AAC audio it's usually the best choice. Convert to MP3 only when a device or app specifically needs it.
Option 1: VLC (every platform)
VLC is the easiest free option, though it re-encodes rather than copying:
- Open VLC and choose Media › Convert / Save (on a Mac: File › Convert / Stream).
- Add the video file and click Convert / Save.
- Choose an audio profile such as “Audio – MP3” or “Audio – FLAC”.
- Set a destination file name with the matching extension, and start.
Option 2: FFmpeg (lossless, command line)
To copy the audio out of an MP4 exactly as it is:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vn -c:a copy output.m4a
-vn drops the video and -c:a copy keeps the audio stream untouched. It finishes in seconds even for long files. If you need MP3 instead: ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vn -c:a libmp3lame -q:a 2 output.mp3
Option 3: Audacity (to edit the audio too)
Audacity, the free audio editor, can open the audio of a video file directly once its optional FFmpeg library is installed. It's the better choice if you also want to cut out silences, reduce background noise or even out levels before exporting.
On a phone
There's no built-in extract-audio tool on iPhone or Android. The simplest route is to do it on a computer. If the video is still online, it's quicker still to download only the audio in the first place: on the YouTube downloader and the other platform pages, the Audio tab lists the soundtrack on its own, at a fraction of the video's size.
Whose audio you can use
Extracting audio from your own recordings, from lectures you're allowed to keep, and from openly licensed material is straightforward. Music is different: turning music videos into audio files is exactly what record labels pursue. What you may legally keep sets out the lines, and finding Creative Commons videos covers material you can reuse.