Convert video to MP3

Take the sound from any video as an MP3, in seconds, right in your browser. No upload, no account, no watermark: your video never leaves your device.

Free, no watermark, no account. Any size of video.

How to convert a video to MP3

Three steps, with nothing to install and no account to make. It works in your browser, on a computer or a phone.

  1. Choose your video

    Drop a file on the page, or pick one from your phone's videos. MP4, MOV, WebM and MKV all work.

  2. Pick the quality

    Standard suits most videos. Small is plenty for speech, and Best is for music from a high-quality video. Each shows how big the MP3 will be.

  3. Export the MP3

    The sound is made into an MP3 on your device, usually in seconds, and saved with the video's name: holiday.mp4 becomes holiday_ohsovideo.mp3.

Why turn a video into an MP3?

Plenty of videos are really about the sound: a recorded talk, a podcast filmed for YouTube, a band's rehearsal, an interview shot on a phone. Keeping the picture makes the file many times bigger than it needs to be, and a video won't play on everything that plays audio. An MP3 of the same sound is a fraction of the size and opens almost anywhere.

What people use it for

  • Listening on the go. Turn a lecture, a webinar or a long interview into an MP3 and play it in a podcast app, a music player or the car, with the screen off.
  • A podcast episode from a video recording. Many shows are filmed and released as audio too, and every podcast host takes MP3, Apple Podcasts included.
  • Keeping a performance you recorded. A concert clip, a rehearsal or a school play, as something to listen to rather than watch.
  • Sending just the sound. A ten-minute talk at Standard quality is an MP3 of about 14 MB, small enough for Gmail's and Outlook's email attachment limits. The video it came from is often hundreds of MB.
  • Audio editors and transcription services that take MP3 more readily than video. If you only need the words, our transcript generator takes the video itself.

Which quality should you choose?

The three options follow the bitrates MP3s are usually made at. Bitrate is how much data each second of sound gets: more data keeps more detail and makes a bigger file.

  • Small, 128 kbps (about 0.96 MB a minute) is plenty for speech: talks, meetings, podcasts and voice memos.
  • Standard, 192 kbps (about 1.4 MB a minute) is the default, for music and most videos. On most headphones, most people can't tell it apart from anything higher.
  • Best, 320 kbps (about 2.4 MB a minute) is the highest an MP3 goes. It's worth it only for music from a video whose own sound is better than 192 kbps.

The page reads your video's sound before you choose and says what it is, such as "Your video's sound is 128 kbps, stereo." If you pick a quality above that, it says so and names the one that sounds the same. A higher bitrate can't put back detail the video never had: it only makes a bigger file.

One limit comes from the MP3 format itself. Sound recorded at a low sample rate, under 32,000 samples a second as some voice-memo apps and older phones use, can't be made into an MP3 above 160 kbps, so the page sizes those at 160.

How big will the MP3 be?

An MP3 at a fixed bitrate is the same size for every minute of sound, whatever the video looked like, so the size is easy to know in advance. The page shows it for your video before you export. As a guide:

LengthSmall 128 kbpsStandard 192 kbpsBest 320 kbps
1 minute0.96 MB1.4 MB2.4 MB
10 minutes9.6 MB14 MB24 MB
1 hour58 MB86 MB144 MB

The video's resolution makes no difference: an hour of 4K and an hour of 480p give MP3s of the same size. That's why the MP3 of a long recording is usually a small fraction of the video it came from.

Does converting to MP3 lose quality?

Technically, a little. MP3 is a lossy format: it saves space by leaving out the sound your ear is least likely to notice. Most video sound is already lossy too, since phones record AAC, so an MP3 made from it is a copy of a copy. At Standard or Best, from typical video sound, the difference is very hard to hear.

Two habits keep it that way. Choose at least the bitrate of the video's own sound, which the page tells you. And avoid converting the same sound from one lossy format to another again and again. For mixing or mastering, where a file is saved many times over, an MP3 isn't the ideal starting point. For listening, sharing and podcasts, it's what nearly everyone uses.

MP3 or M4A?

The sound inside most MP4 and MOV videos is AAC, which is usually saved on its own as an M4A file. AAC sounds slightly better than MP3 at the same bitrate, and newer devices play it without trouble. MP3 is still the format that plays on practically everything: older car stereos, MP3 players, smart speakers, every podcast host and every computer, with no extra software. Its last patents expired in 2017, so it's free for anyone to use. If you don't know where the file will end up, MP3 is the safe choice.

How it works in your browser

When you choose a video, the page reads only its sound, a piece at a time, so the size of the file doesn't matter and an hour-long recording is fine. Your browser decodes the sound, and LAME, the widely used open-source MP3 encoder, turns it into an MP3, running as WebAssembly on your device. It's fetched only when you make an MP3, and our privacy policy credits it and links to its licence and source. The picture is never decoded, which is why a long 4K video converts quickly.

Nothing is uploaded. The video stays on your device the whole time, and once the page has loaded it works offline. Stereo stays stereo and mono stays mono, a video with surround sound is mixed down to stereo (an MP3 holds two channels at most), and the sample rate is kept as it was.

On a phone

It works the same way in Safari on an iPhone or iPad and in Chrome on Android. Choose a video from your gallery, pick a quality and export, and the MP3 is saved to your downloads: on an iPhone, that's the Downloads folder in the Files app. Phones pause a page that isn't in front, so keep it open until the MP3 is saved. A long video converts more quickly on a computer.

Before you convert

  • Only want part of it? Trim the video first: trimming copies the part you keep without re-encoding it. Then convert the trimmed clip.
  • Want the video without its sound instead? Mute video does the opposite: it removes the sound and keeps the picture.
  • Use sound you have the right to use. Your own recordings and freely licensed videos are fine. Music taken from someone else's video still belongs to them.
Tom Limb, who makes Oh So Video

Built by me, Tom Limb 👋

Founder of Oh So Video · Founder and CEO of Videvo · formerly Head of Video at Magnific

I've spent my career helping people make better videos. My previous company, Videvo, gave away footage for free to millions of users worldwide. Now, Oh So Video does the same with video tools. Every tool you find on this website runs in your browser. No need to upload, sign up or wait for server-side processing to get it done.

Tom Limb on LinkedIn

Questions about video to MP3

Is my video uploaded to convert it to MP3?

No. The sound is taken from the video and made into an MP3 by your own browser, on your device. Nothing is uploaded, so it works on private videos and even offline once the page has loaded.

Which MP3 quality should I choose?

Standard, 192 kbps, suits music and most videos: most people can't hear a difference beyond it. Small, 128 kbps, is plenty for talks, podcasts and voice memos, at two thirds of the size. Best, 320 kbps, only helps when the video's own sound is better than that; the page tells you what your video's sound is.

Does converting to MP3 lose quality?

MP3 is a compressed format, and a video's sound usually is too, so the MP3 is made from sound that's already compressed. At Standard or Best the difference is very hard to hear. Choosing a higher quality than the video's own sound makes a bigger file, not a better one.

How long can the video be?

Any length and any size of file: only the sound is read, a piece at a time. An hour of video makes an MP3 of about 86 MB at Standard.

Which videos work?

MP4, MOV, WebM and MKV, from phones, cameras, screen recorders and editing apps, as long as the video has sound. A video in a format your browser can't play still works, as long as it can read the sound.

Does it work on iPhone and Android?

Yes, in Safari on iPhone and Chrome on Android. Choose a video from your gallery, pick the quality and export: the MP3 is saved to your downloads.

What is the MP3 called?

Your video's name with _ohsovideo added and .mp3 on the end, such as holiday_ohsovideo.mp3. The video itself is never changed.

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