Extract audio from a video
Take the sound out of a video file and keep it on its own. Useful for lectures, interviews and podcasts recorded to video that you only ever need to listen to.
Loading the tool…
Your file is uploaded to be processed, then handled under our retention policy.
Why extract the audio
Because a great many videos are really just recordings of people talking. A ninety-minute lecture as MP4 might be two gigabytes; the same lecture as audio is around eighty megabytes, plays in the background, works on a phone with the screen off, and loses nothing you were actually going to watch.
What you get
A re-encode, not a copy of the original track. The audio is decoded out of the video and encoded fresh in the format you choose, which means one round of re-compression if you pick MP3 or M4A. Choose WAV to avoid that entirely, at the cost of a much larger file. For speech, MP3 is almost always the right answer and the loss is inaudible.
Formats it can read
MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI and essentially anything else FFmpeg opens. A video with no audio track is reported as such rather than producing a silent file.
The file is uploaded
Video decoding needs FFmpeg, which does not exist in a browser, so this one runs on the server. Your file is uploaded, processed, and handled under the retention policy. Size and duration limits apply, and they are shown on the page rather than discovered when the upload fails.
Going straight to text
If the reason you want the audio is to get a transcript, skip this step: video to text takes the video directly and gives you an editable, searchable transcript with timings.
Questions
Is the video uploaded?
Yes. Decoding video needs FFmpeg, which cannot run in your browser, so the file is uploaded and processed on the server under the normal retention policy.
Do I get the original audio or a re-encode?
A re-encode, in the format you pick. The audio is decoded from the video and encoded fresh, so choose WAV if you want no further quality loss.
I actually want the words, not the audio.
Then go straight to video to text — it transcribes the video in one step and gives you an editable, searchable transcript.
Turn what is said into text
Scriptorium's main job is transcription: bring a video or an audio file and get back text you can read, correct, search and export.