How to Extract Audio From a Video File Free

When would you need to do this?

There are more situations than you'd think. You recorded a voice memo as a video. You have a concert recording and just want the music. You captured a podcast on your phone as a video file. Someone sent you a video and you want just the audio to listen to on a walk. All of these are common — and all of them are solved by extracting the audio track from the video.

The good news is that extracting audio is one of the simplest things you can do with a video file. No re-encoding, no quality loss — the audio is literally already in the video file, it just needs to be pulled out.

What format should you extract to?

It depends on what you're going to do with it:

MP3

Universal compatibility. Plays everywhere. Good for music and podcasts.

AAC

Better quality than MP3 at the same file size. Default on Apple devices.

WAV

Uncompressed, lossless. Large files but perfect quality. Good for editing.

FLAC

Lossless but compressed. Smaller than WAV with no quality loss.

For most people, MP3 at 192k or higher is the right call. It's small, it plays on everything, and the quality is excellent for anything other than professional audio work.

How to extract audio using Filesmith

Filesmith can extract the audio from any video file directly in your browser. The video never gets uploaded anywhere — the extraction happens locally on your device.

Go to filesmith.io and click the Video tab.

Drop your video file onto the page — MP4, MOV, MKV, AVI, and most other formats are supported.

Select MP3 from the format options. This puts Filesmith into audio extraction mode — it strips the video and outputs just the audio track.

Hit Convert & Compress. Once done, click Download to save your audio file.

If you want a different audio format like WAV or AAC, use the Audio tab instead — drop your video there and pick any output format. Filesmith will extract and convert in one step.

Will the audio quality be affected?

When extracting to MP3, the audio is re-encoded, which involves a small amount of quality loss inherent to the MP3 format. At 192k or higher bitrate, this is completely inaudible to most people.

If you want to preserve the audio with absolutely no quality loss, extract to WAV or FLAC instead. These are lossless formats — the audio will be bit-for-bit identical to what was in the original video.