Video to MP3, without uploading anything

Keep the sound, drop the picture. An MP4, MOV, MKV or WebM goes in and an MP3 the same length comes out, made on your own device. No account, no watermark, no size cap.

Drop your video here

or click to browse. MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI and the rest, with no size cap. Stays on your computer.

The whole length

Nothing is cut, faded or trimmed to a preview. A two-hour lecture comes out as a two-hour MP3.

No upload, so no cap

Your file never leaves the tab. There is no server bill to protect, so there is no plan tier to hit.

Mono stays mono

A phone video with one channel is given half the bitrate and sounds identical. Most tools spend it anyway.

Plays everywhere

MP3 opens on every phone, car stereo and player made this century. That is why it is the only output here.

Three qualities, and what they are for

High keeps music intact and is what to use if there are instruments in the recording. Balanced is the usual answer. Small is built for speech — a lecture, an interview, a meeting — where the file gets very small and stays perfectly clear.

Each number is per channel rather than per file. A soundtrack with one channel, which is what most phone videos and nearly every screen recording carry, is given half of what a stereo one gets and sounds exactly the same. Handing both the same bitrate is the most common waste in a converter like this.

The bitrate is also never raised above what the source already had. Writing a 96 kbps soundtrack out as a 192 kbps MP3 produces a bigger file carrying exactly the same sound, so it is not done.

Where the size goes

Almost all of a video file is frames. When the picture is dropped, what is left is a small fraction of what you started with, and that fraction is the part you wanted. The compression setting moves the result a little; deleting the video track moves it by an order of magnitude.

Things this page will not do

It does not trim. The whole soundtrack comes out. To keep one stretch of a recording, cut the video first with the video trimmer, then bring the clip back here.

It does not clean the sound. Hiss, hum and room noise come through exactly as they were. That is a separate tool.

It writes MP3 and nothing else. No M4A, no WAV, no FLAC on this page.

It cannot invent sound that is not there. A silent file gets a message rather than an empty MP3.

Common questions

Does the recording get shorter or quieter?

No. The length is exactly what it was and the volume is untouched. The only thing that changes is that the sound is now stored as MP3 rather than as whatever the video carried, and that the picture is gone.

Why is the MP3 so much smaller than the video?

Because almost all of a video file is picture. On a nine-minute phone recording the sound was about four per cent of the bytes; the rest was frames. Dropping them is where the saving comes from, not the MP3 encoder.

Can I get an M4A or a WAV instead?

Not on this page. MP3 is what plays on everything from a car stereo to a decade-old phone, and it is the format the question is usually asking for. If you need a different one, run the MP3 through the audio compressor, which chooses between MP3 and M4A based on what came in.

What if the video has no sound?

You are told so, rather than handed an empty file. A silent recording, a screen capture made without audio, or a track in a codec the engine cannot read all end the same way — with a message, not a download.

What happens to a 5.1 soundtrack?

It comes back as stereo, because MP3 holds two channels at most. Nothing is muted: the surround channels are folded into the two.

Is there a file size limit?

No fixed one. There is no upload, so the only limit is your own device’s memory. A two-hour recording is a lot to hold in a browser tab; a talk or an interview is not.

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