Guide
How to extract the audio from a video
Drop the video on Anyfile’s Video to Audio page and its sound downloads as an M4A file a moment later. To keep only part of it, or to get a WAV for audio editing, open the video in the video editor, trim it, and choose Sound only when you download.
Step by step
Drop the video
Go to Video to Audio and drop an MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV or AVI, or click Choose files.
Find the M4A in Downloads
When the card says Converted to M4A, the sound is in your Downloads folder under the video’s name. It’s AAC at 192 kbps, which plays on phones, computers and in most editing apps.
Keep just part of it
Open the video in the video editor. Play to where the part you want starts and press I, then press O where it ends. S splits at the playhead, so you can cut out a stretch in the middle too.
Choose the kind of file
Open the arrow next to Download and set Format to Sound only (M4A) for a small file, or Sound only (WAV) for an uncompressed 16-bit file to edit, then press Download.
The sound is decoded and saved again, so the M4A is a fresh encoding at a quality that’s hard to tell from the source for speech and most music. WAV keeps everything the decoder hands back, at the cost of size: roughly 10 MB a minute in stereo.
A volume change or fade set with the editor’s Sound and Fade tools is applied to the sound you save. To go further, such as evening out the loudness or trimming silence, open the M4A in the audio editor.
Nothing is uploaded: your browser reads the file and makes the new one on your device. See how it works, and how to check.
Other ways to do it
On a Mac. Open the video in QuickTime Player and choose File › Export As › Audio Only. It saves an M4A of the whole video; shorten it first with Edit › Trim.
VLC. Free for Windows, Mac and Linux. Choose Convert/Save in the Media menu (File › Convert / Stream on a Mac), pick an audio profile such as MP3, and save. It takes a few more clicks, but it can write MP3, which browsers can’t.
ffmpeg. A free command-line tool that can copy the sound out without decoding it at all, which is ideal for batches if you’re comfortable typing commands.
When Anyfile is quicker
For an interview, a lecture or a song from a clip, the browser is quickest: drop and done, with nothing to install. QuickTime is just as quick on a Mac for a whole video. If you need MP3 specifically, use VLC.
Questions
Can I get an MP3?
Not from the browser: browsers can’t encode MP3. M4A plays almost everywhere MP3 does. VLC can write MP3 if you need one.
Which is better, M4A or WAV?
M4A for listening and sharing, since it’s small. WAV for editing in an audio app, since it isn’t compressed, though it’s many times larger.
What if the video has no sound?
Then there’s nothing to save, and Anyfile says so rather than handing you a silent file. Screen recordings often have no sound unless the microphone was on.
Is my video uploaded?
No. The sound is taken out in your browser, on your device, and the video never leaves it.