What this does
Decodes the sound track of the video and encodes it as an MP3. The video’s location, device and date details are not carried into the MP3, and no tags are written.
What it can’t do
Improve the sound, separate voices from music, or convert the picture. For a smaller video file you need a video converter, which this site does not offer because it cannot run well in a browser.
A worked example
A two-hour recorded lecture is a 1.4 GB MP4. As a 128 kbps MP3 it is 110 MB, fits on a phone for the commute, and the whole job ran on a laptop without the video going anywhere.
Questions
- Is the whole video uploaded somewhere?
- No. The video is read by your browser on your device, and only the sound is written out. It works with airplane mode on.
- What bitrate should I choose?
- 128 kbps is plenty for speech, a lecture or a podcast. 192 kbps suits music. 320 kbps is the most MP3 allows, and rarely worth the extra size.
- Why not just extract the audio?
- Extracting copies the sound as it is stored in the video, which is usually AAC in an M4A file, with no quality loss. Choose that when any player will do. Choose MP3 when the file must be an MP3.
- How large a video can it handle?
- It depends on your device. A few hundred megabytes is fine on a phone; a computer handles more. Only the sound is held in memory, not the picture.
Your file stays on this device
The tool above runs in a sealed frame that cannot send your file anywhere. It works with airplane mode on, and the counter above it stays at 0. Here is how you can check that yourself.
Related tools
- Extract audio from video Save the sound of a video as its own file, with no quality loss.
- M4A to MP3 Turn an iPhone voice memo or an AAC track into an MP3.
- Convert audio Change a recording to WAV, MP3, FLAC or OGG.
- Trim audio Cut the start and end of a recording.
- WAV to MP3 Shrink a WAV recording into an MP3 about a tenth of the size.
- MP3 to WAV Save an MP3 as an uncompressed WAV for editing.
- MOV to MP4 Change the container of a video without re-encoding it.
Last updated .