Extract Audio from Video

How to use the Extract Audio from Video

1. Choose or drag in a video file. The tool reads its sound track and draws the waveform.
2. To keep everything, leave the selection as it is. To keep only part, drag the blue handles or type start and end times.
3. Press Play selection to check what you'll get.
4. Tick Mix down to mono for speech, lectures or voice notes to halve the file size.
5. Click Save audio as WAV, listen to the result, then download it.

How it works

A video file is a container that holds a picture track and usually one sound track, each compressed separately (for example H.264 video with AAC audio in an MP4, or VP9 with Opus in a WebM). Your browser already has decoders for these formats, so the tool hands the whole file to the Web Audio decoder, which ignores the picture and returns the sound as raw samples. Nothing is uploaded or re-recorded, so extraction is fast and exact.

The samples are then written to an uncompressed 16-bit PCM WAV file. WAV works in every audio editor, video editor and media player, and it doesn't add another round of lossy compression. The trade-off is size: stereo audio at 48 kHz takes about 11 MB per minute, and mono takes about half. Example: a 4-minute phone video gives a WAV of roughly 44 MB in stereo or 22 MB in mono.

Because the whole video is read into memory to find its sound, very large files can be slow or fail, especially on phones. If that happens, trim the video first with our Video Trimmer. Some containers and codecs, such as certain MOV files or AC-3 surround sound, aren't supported by every browser's decoder; in that case the tool tells you, and Chrome or Edge is usually the best browser to try.

Frequently asked questions

Which video formats work?
MP4 (with AAC audio) and WebM (with Opus or Vorbis audio) work in Chrome, Edge and Firefox. Safari reads MP4 and MOV. MKV and other containers work only in some browsers. If your browser can't read the sound, you'll see a message instead of a waveform.

Why WAV and not MP3?
WAV is lossless and opens everywhere, and making it needs no extra software. Creating MP3 would require an encoder library under a license we don't use on this site. Any audio app can convert the WAV later if you need a smaller file.

How large a video can I use?
The file is read into memory, so it works best under about 500 MB on a computer and 150 MB on a phone. Only the sound is kept after decoding, which is much smaller than the video.

The video has no sound. What happens?
If the file has no audio track, the browser's decoder reports an error and the tool tells you there is nothing to extract.

Is my video uploaded?
No. The file is opened and decoded by your browser on your own device.