Convert MP4 to MP3

Get the audio out of any video

Want the soundtrack of a video, a recorded talk as a podcast, a lecture to listen to on the bus, or a song from a clip you filmed? Fileopia's MP4 to MP3 converter extracts the audio from MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV and M4V videos and saves it as an MP3 that plays on every phone, car stereo, smart speaker and music app – or as an uncompressed WAV for editing.

Unlike most online converters, your video is never uploaded. That matters for videos: they are big, so uploading takes ages on a normal connection, and they are often private – family moments, meetings, interviews. Here the conversion starts the moment you click, runs at the speed of your own device, and there is no file size limit beyond your device's memory.

There are no adverts between steps, no e-mail address required to download, and no daily limit on conversions. Convert one clip or a whole folder of recordings, as often as you like – the only limit is the memory of the device you are using, and even phones handle typical videos easily.

Features

• MP3 bitrates from 64 to 320 kbps, or lossless WAV.
• Trim: set a start and end time to keep only the part you need.
• Fade in and fade out from 1 to 5 seconds.
• Volume: boost quiet recordings up to 300% or lower loud ones.
• ID3 tags: title, artist, album, year and cover art, so the file looks right in music players.
• Mono or stereo, and sample rate 48, 44.1 or 22 kHz.
• Batch conversion: drop many videos and get a ZIP of MP3s.
• Preview player to listen before downloading.
• Works with MP4, MOV (iPhone), WebM, MKV, M4V and most videos your browser can play.
• Instant start: no upload and no queue – conversion begins the moment you click, and the result is ready to play in the built-in preview.

How to convert MP4 to MP3

• Drop one or more videos onto the page.
• Choose MP3 and a quality: 192 kbps is great for music, 128 for speech.
• Optionally set start/end, fades, volume and tags.
• Click Convert. Listen to the preview.
• Download the MP3 (or a ZIP for several files).

Which bitrate should I choose?

A higher bitrate cannot add quality the video did not have. Most phone videos and online clips carry AAC audio at 96–192 kbps; converting them at 192 kbps preserves practically everything. Going to 320 kbps mainly makes the file larger. For speech, choosing Mono halves the size with no audible difference.

MP4 and MP3 explained

MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14) is a container – a box that holds a video stream (usually H.264 or H.265), one or more audio streams (usually AAC) and metadata. MP3 (MPEG-1/2 Audio Layer III) is an audio-only format, introduced in the 1990s and still the most compatible audio format in the world. Converting MP4 to MP3 means taking the audio stream out of the container, decoding it to raw sound, and encoding it again as MP3. The video part is simply ignored, which is why the MP3 is a fraction of the size.

MOV is Apple's QuickTime container, used by iPhones and Macs; WebM is the open format used by browsers and many screen recorders; MKV (Matroska) is popular for films and recordings. All of them work the same way here: the browser's media engine reads the audio, and Fileopia encodes the MP3.

Trim, fade and volume

Often you only want part of a video: a song from a concert clip, an answer from an interview, the speech from a wedding video. Type the start and end times (for example 1:05 and 4:30, or 0:12.5 for half-second precision) and only that part is saved. Fade-in and fade-out make the cut sound smooth instead of starting abruptly. The volume setting raises quiet phone recordings – 150–200% is usually right – or lowers clipping-loud ones. For very precise editing with a waveform, use Audio Cutter after conversion.

ID3 tags and cover art

MP3 files can carry information about themselves in ID3 tags: title, artist, album, year and an embedded cover picture. Music apps, car stereos and phones use these to display the track properly instead of showing a file name like VID_20260412_183012. Open the 'MP3 tags' panel, fill in the fields and add a JPG or PNG cover – for example a frame from the video or a podcast logo. Tags are written in the widely supported ID3v2.3 format.

Uses

• Turning recorded lectures, webinars and talks into podcasts.
• Saving the music from your own concert or event videos.
• Extracting voice-overs and interviews for editing.
• Making audio versions of meetings for people who missed them.
• Creating background music or sound effects from your own clips.
• Saving a voice message received as a video.
• Language learning: listen to video lessons without the screen.

Copyright

Only convert videos you own or have the right to use – your own recordings, Creative Commons content, or material whose licence allows it. Downloading and converting music or films from streaming platforms usually breaks their terms of service and may infringe copyright. Fileopia does not download videos from websites; it converts files you already have on your device.

MP3, WAV or something else?

MP3 is the right answer for nine out of ten people: every device made in the last 25 years plays it. Choose WAV only when you plan to edit the audio in software such as Audacity, GarageBand, Premiere or a DAW, where an uncompressed file avoids an extra generation of compression.

Converting phone videos

iPhone: videos are MOV files using HEVC video and AAC audio. Transfer them to your computer (AirDrop, iCloud Photos download, cable) or open this page in Safari on the iPhone itself and choose the video from your library – Safari offers 'Photo Library' in the file picker. Android: videos are MP4 files in DCIM/Camera. In Chrome on Android, tap the drop area and choose the video from Files or Gallery. The MP3 is saved to your Downloads folder, from where you can move it to a music app.

Converting screen recordings, webinars and meetings

Zoom, Teams, Google Meet and OBS recordings are usually MP4 or MKV files with speech audio. For these, choose 96 or 128 kbps and Mono: a one-hour meeting then becomes a 40–55 MB MP3, small enough to share by e-mail or messenger, and perfect for listening on a commute. Use the trim fields to skip the minutes before everyone joined. If the speakers are quiet, raise the volume to 150%.

Batch tips

When you drop several videos, the same settings – format, bitrate, trim, fades, volume and tags – are applied to each one. Trim times are usually only useful for a single file, so leave them empty for batches. Tags such as artist and album are handy for a series, for example all parts of a course or all songs from one concert; give each file a title afterwards in your music app if needed. All results are collected in one ZIP.

Troubleshooting

Quality: does re-encoding hurt?

Video audio is already compressed, usually as AAC. Converting to MP3 decodes it and compresses it again with a different method, so in theory some information is lost twice. In practice, at 192 kbps or more the result is indistinguishable from the original for nearly all listeners and material, because both AAC and MP3 at these rates are well above the threshold of audibility for typical content. If you need a mathematically identical copy of the original audio for archiving, choose WAV.

Sample rate and channels

The sample rate is how many times per second the sound is measured. 44.1 kHz is the CD standard and what most MP3 players expect; 48 kHz is the standard in video, so most videos already use it. Choosing 'Keep' avoids unnecessary resampling. 22 kHz halves the data and is fine for speech-only content such as lectures, but cuts off high frequencies in music. Stereo keeps left and right channels; Mono mixes them into one, halving the bitrate needed for the same quality – ideal for single-microphone recordings where both channels are the same anyway.

Using MP3s from videos in other projects

Extracted audio is useful far beyond listening. Use it as the soundtrack for a slideshow, add it to a new video in an editor, create a ringtone with Ringtone Maker, transcribe a talk, or clean up a recording in an audio editor. If you plan further editing, extract as WAV to keep the highest quality, and only export to MP3 at the end of your workflow.

Why the MP3 is so much smaller than the video

In a typical phone video, the picture uses 95–98% of the data and the audio only 2–5%. A 100 MB, 1-minute 1080p video usually contains only about 1–1.5 MB of audio. That is why extracting the audio produces a file around one hundredth of the size – perfect when you only need the sound, and an easy way to save space on your phone if you keep recordings of talks or concerts mainly for listening.

Glossary

• Bitrate (kbps): how much data is used per second of audio; higher means better quality and larger files.
• Container: the file type that holds streams, such as MP4, MOV or MKV.
• Codec: the compression method for a stream, such as AAC, MP3 or Opus.
• ID3 tag: metadata stored inside an MP3 – title, artist, album, cover.
• Sample rate: how many audio samples are taken per second, e.g. 44,100.
• Mono / stereo: one channel, or separate left and right channels.
• Lossless: no information is discarded, as in WAV; MP3 and AAC are lossy.

Privacy

Every step happens inside your browser tab. The file is read from your disk, decoded and re-encoded on your own device using the browser's built-in media engine (WebCodecs and Web Audio) and WebAssembly, and the result goes straight to your downloads folder. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored on a server and there is no queue – so family videos, interviews, voice memos, meetings and unreleased content never leave your computer or phone. Large files are not slowed down by your upload speed either: a 1 GB video starts processing instantly instead of after a ten-minute upload.

Related tools

• Audio Cutter – trim MP3s with a waveform.
• Compress Video – make videos smaller.
• MOV to MP4 – convert iPhone videos.
• Video to GIF – turn clips into GIFs.
• Trim Video – cut videos.