Extracts the audio from an MP4 as uncompressed WAV. This is the right target when the audio is going into an editor, a transcription tool or an analysis pipeline — anywhere a second lossy compression would be a needless loss.
Why WAV rather than MP3 here
For listening the difference is inaudible and MP3 is a tenth the size. For processing it matters: transcription models, noise reduction, forensic analysis and mastering all work better on audio that has been through one lossy generation rather than two, and most of them want WAV as input anyway.
It will be a large file
Two things reduce it honestly. Mono halves it and is correct for speech. Dropping the sample rate to 22 kHz halves it again and is inaudible for voice. Neither adds any compression artefact, because there is no compression.
WAV cannot restore what was lost
Formats a browser genuinely cannot read
WMA (Windows Media Audio), AC-3 and DTS (cinema surround tracks), AMR (old phone voice recordings) and RealAudio are not decodable by any browser. If your file uses one you are told which, rather than being left with a failure that says nothing.
HEVC video cannot be decoded either — but that does not matter here. Extracting audio discards the video track before anything tries to decode it, so an iPhone recording converts perfectly well even though the browser could not play its picture.
Other names for this
Also searched as “extract wav from mp4”, “mp4 audio to wav”.
Questions
- Why is the WAV so much bigger than the video?
- WAV is uncompressed — roughly 10 MB per minute in stereo. The MP4’s audio was compressed to a fraction of that.
- Does this improve the audio quality?
- No. It prevents further loss but cannot recover what the source already discarded.
- Which should I use for transcription?
- WAV, mono, 16 kHz. That is what most speech models expect and it keeps the file small.
- Is my file uploaded?
- No. The demuxing, decoding and encoding all happen in this tab using the browser’s own media stack plus a WebAssembly encoder. A recording can be an interview, a lecture, a private call — none of it is transmitted. Turn your Wi-Fi off after the page loads and it still works.
- How large a file can I convert?
- There is no imposed limit, only your device’s memory — around 2 GB in a desktop browser and 400 MB on a phone, since the file is held in memory while it converts. A two-hour video converts in well under a minute on a laptop.
- Can I convert several files at once?
- Yes. Drop as many as you like, or a whole folder. Each keeps its original name with the new extension, and you can download them individually or as a ZIP.