Audio Transcriptor
Start

Pull the audio out of any video

MP4, MOV, MKV, WEBM or AVI in — MP3, M4A or WAV out. In your browser, with no upload and no account.

  1. 1File
  2. 2Settings
  3. 3Processing
  4. 4Download
  • MP4
  • MOV
  • MKV
  • WEBM
  • AVI
  • FLV
  • WMV

What this tool does

The question here isn't whether it can be done, it's which format to take it to — and that depends entirely on what happens next. MP3 is the one everything plays, from a fifteen-year-old car stereo to a website. M4A is the same idea done later and better: at the same size it sounds cleaner, and it's what a phone records in. WAV isn't compressed at all, which makes it huge and makes it the right answer when the audio is going into an editor.

If it's going to be transcribed, none of that matters much: 96 kbps of MP3 carries a voice perfectly and any transcription service will take it. Where the format does matter is with music, with anything you're going to edit afterwards, and with anything you'll want to convert again later — every re-encode of a compressed file loses a bit more, and WAV is the only one of the three that doesn't.

What we handle that others don't

  • Three output formats and four quality levels, so you don't have to convert twice to get what you needed.
  • Plus a fourth option, «as-is», that pulls the audio out without re-encoding it: instant however long the recording is, and it loses nothing at all, because it is the same data in a different wrapper.
  • WAV comes out at 16 bits and 44.1 kHz — the standard an editor expects, not whatever the video happened to carry.
  • It reads containers a browser cannot play on its own, like MKV or AVI: the decoder is the real ffmpeg, not the one in your browser.
  • Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored. Once the page is loaded you can pull the plug on your connection and it still works.

How it works

  1. 1

    Drop the video

    Any of the usual containers. It stays on your machine the whole time.

  2. 2

    Choose format and quality

    MP3 to play it anywhere, M4A for the best sound per megabyte, WAV to edit it.

  3. 3

    Download the audio

    With the original name and the new extension, ready to use.

In detail

Which format to pick, based on what happens next

If the audio is going to be listened to and that's it, MP3 and stop thinking about it: everything plays it, from a fifteen-year-old car stereo to a web player. If it's headed for an editor — Premiere, DaVinci, Audacity, a podcast tool — take WAV: it isn't compressed, so you can cut it, mix it and export it again without every step leaving a mark.

M4A is the middle option almost nobody picks and almost always wins: at the same size it sounds better than MP3 because the codec is twenty years newer, and it's what phones record. Its only downside is the usual one — some older software chokes on it. For a transcript any of the three is plenty; what matters there is that the voice is audible, not the container.

The containers your browser can't open

An MKV off a camera, a ten-year-old AVI, an FLV that came from some old website: none of them plays in Chrome. You press play and nothing happens. That doesn't mean they're broken — browsers ship with only a handful of decoders, and those formats aren't among them.

They open here, because what runs inside the tab is a complete ffmpeg, the same one desktop converters use underneath. It reads the container, finds the audio track and pulls it out even when the browser couldn't show you a single frame of the video.

Questions

And if what you have is the video?

Upload it and you'll get the transcript with timestamps, the speakers separated by name and a summary with the key points. You can start without an account.

Transcribe my recordingSee prices

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