Extract the audio from a video

Worked example

Dropping the video track and keeping the audio is one of the cheapest operations there is.

The equivalent command

ffmpeg -i holiday-clip.mp4 -vn -c:a libmp3lame -b:a 192k -threads 1 -y out-holiday-clip.mp3

This is exactly what runs in the browser. Copy it to run the same job locally on a file too large for a tab.

Why it matters

If the audio is already in a format you want, this can copy it out untouched — no re-encoding, no quality loss, and it finishes almost instantly. Re-encoding is only needed when you want a different codec, such as the AAC inside an MP4 turned into MP3. Choosing a lossless target like WAV or FLAC guarantees no further loss, at the cost of size.

What this needs

A 30.7 MB FFmpeg download, cached by your browser after the first time. Nothing is downloaded until you click.