The audio inside a video file is already a complete, finished recording — an interview, a lecture, a song, a podcast take. Pulling it out is not a conversion so much as a separation, and it does not require the video to be decoded at all.
What the Extract Audio does
Discards the video stream and writes the audio to its own file. MP3 uses LAME at quality level 2, a variable bitrate that averages roughly 190 kbps — transparent for speech and close to it for music, at about a tenth of the size of the lossless option.
WAV writes uncompressed 16-bit PCM. Nothing is thrown away, which matters if the audio is going into an editor for further work, but the file is large: roughly 10 MB per minute of stereo.
Open the Extract Audio and follow the settings and checks below.
Formats and settings
| Setting | What it means |
|---|---|
| MP3 | LAME VBR, quality 2 (~190 kbps average) |
| WAV | 16-bit PCM, uncompressed |
| Rough size, MP3 | About 1.4 MB per minute |
| Rough size, WAV | About 10 MB per minute, stereo |
| Video handling | Discarded (-vn) — never decoded |
| Maximum input | 2 GB |
| Maximum length | 30 minutes |
How to use it
- Drop the video in.
- Choose MP3 for listening, sharing or transcription; WAV if the audio is going into an editor.
- Extract, then download.
A practical quality check
Choose WAV whenever the audio has more work ahead of it — noise reduction, levelling, mixing. Every MP3 encode is lossy, so editing an MP3 and re-saving it applies that loss twice. If the file is only ever going to be listened to, MP3 is the sensible default and a tenth of the size.
Common questions
Which should I pick, MP3 or WAV?
MP3 for anything you will listen to, upload or send — at quality 2 most people cannot distinguish it from the source. WAV if it is going into audio software, because further editing compounds the loss from a lossy format.
Is the MP3 a fixed bitrate?
No. It uses variable bitrate at quality level 2, which spends more data on complex passages and less on quiet ones. That gives better quality per megabyte than a fixed rate, so the average lands near 190 kbps rather than being pinned there.
Can this be better than the original audio?
No, and nothing can. If the video already contained a heavily compressed 64 kbps track, extracting it to WAV produces a large file that sounds exactly like a 64 kbps track. Extraction preserves; it cannot restore.
Why is this fast when compressing a video is slow?
The video is never decoded — it is discarded with a single flag. Only the audio is processed, and audio is a fraction of the data in a video file.
Useful next tools
- Mute Video — Remove the audio track to avoid copyright strikes.
- Adjust Volume — Make a video louder or quieter without touching the picture.
- Trim Video — Cut the segment you want and save it.
- Convert Video — Convert MOV, MKV, AVI, WebM and more to universal MP4.
Vootkit provides a browser tool and educational guidance, not a guarantee that every browser, device or third-party platform will accept every file. Platform specifications can change, so verify important publishing requirements with the destination service.
Try the tools from this guide
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