Extracting just the audio from a video file, without any video editing software

A recorded interview, a voice memo captured as a video by accident, or a song from a concert recording — sometimes the video itself doesn't matter and all you actually need is the audio track, without the overhead of installing a full video editor to get it.

What's actually inside a video file

A video file is a container holding at least two separate streams — the video frames and the audio track — muxed together into one file. Extracting audio doesn't require any transcoding of the actual sound data in the simplest case; it just means pulling that existing audio stream out on its own and repackaging it as a standalone audio file, discarding the video stream entirely.

Choosing an output format

• MP3 is the safest default for compatibility — it plays everywhere, on every device and platform, at the cost of being a lossy, already-compressed format.
• WAV preserves audio without any compression, useful if you plan to edit the audio further afterward and don't want compression artifacts compounding, at the cost of a much larger file.
• If the original video's audio was already compressed (most phone and web video is), converting to a different lossy format doesn't recover any quality that was already lost — it just repackages what's there.

Doing this in the browser

Extract Audio from Video pulls the audio stream out of a video file and saves it as a standalone audio file, running through WebCodecs entirely on your device — the video file never needs to be uploaded anywhere, which matters given that video files tend to be considerably larger than the audio extracted from them.