MOV to MP3 Converter Audio out of iPhone and Mac video
MOV is what an iPhone camera, QuickTime and most Mac recording tools write, so it is the format people end up with when the thing they actually wanted was the sound. Drop the file in and the audio track comes back out as an MP3 at 128 kbps, 44.1 kHz. The picture is never decoded and nothing is uploaded, because the whole job runs inside this browser tab.
- iPhone and QuickTime
- Nothing uploaded
- 128 kbps MP3
Convert MOV to MP3
MP4, MOV, M4V, MKV, AVI, WMV, WebM, TS, MTS and more
Up to 20 clips at once
Privacy-first. No uploads. If this helps, share it.
- The recording stays on your device
FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly does the extraction inside this page. That matters for the things people usually have in MOV form: a conversation recorded on a phone, a client interview, a lecture, a Mac screen recording with your own narration and half your desktop in shot.
- Audio only, picture skipped
The video track is dropped rather than decoded, so extraction is far quicker than converting the same file. The audio is encoded with LAME at 128 kbps and resampled to 44.1 kHz, which is the one setting this tool exports.
- 20 files per batch, 1 GB each
Queue up a set of interviews or a term of lecture recordings and take the MP3s one by one or as a zip. They run one after another, since the browser build is single threaded.
How to get an MP3 out of a MOV file
Add the MOV, wait for the audio track to be encoded, then save the MP3. Nothing is sent anywhere, so there is no queue and no account. This is the usual fix when a recording was made with the camera app instead of a voice recorder, when a QuickTime capture is mostly narration, or when something further down the line wants audio and refuses to take a video file.
- Add the MOV
- The audio track is encoded here
- Save the MP3
MOV vs MP3: what you keep and what you lose
A MOV is a QuickTime container. It wraps a video track, at least one audio track and metadata such as creation date and timecode. An MP3 is not a container in that sense at all, it is a single audio stream with a tag block on the front. So the conversion is less a translation than a choice about what to throw away.
| What changes | MOV in | MP3 out |
|---|---|---|
| The container | QuickTime MOV, holding video, audio and metadata like timecode and creation date together | A bare MP3 stream with an ID3 tag. There is nowhere in it to put a picture. |
| The video track | H.264 or HEVC from a phone, ProRes from an edit or a pro camera. Usually most of the file. | Gone. It is not decoded, not converted and not written out. |
| The audio track | AAC on iPhone and most Mac recordings, or linear PCM from field recorders, camera XLR inputs and some Final Cut exports | MP3 at 128 kbps, 44.1 kHz. One fixed setting, no bitrate picker. |
| Where it opens | Comfortable inside Apple apps. MOV support is less consistent outside Apple workflows, and depends on the codec inside. | Music players, car stereos, podcast apps, voice note apps, transcription services and every audio editor. |
| Size | Whatever the camera wrote, driven mainly by the video track and by whether the audio was compressed | Roughly a megabyte per minute of runtime, whatever the source was. |
There is no route back. Once you have the MP3, the picture cannot be recovered from it, so keep the original MOV until you are certain you are done with the video.
Why pull the audio out at all
Two different problems land on this page. The first is that you only ever wanted the sound: the video was incidental, a phone propped against a mug during an interview, or a screen recording where the useful part is the commentary. The second is size. If the MOV came off professional gear, its audio may be linear PCM, which stores every sample uncompressed and takes an order of magnitude more room than a 128 kbps MP3 of the same recording. Add the video track on top and a two hour session can be unpleasant to move around. Extracting to MP3 turns it into a file you can email, drop into a transcription tool or keep on a phone.
The honest half: MOV audio is usually AAC, which is already lossy, so writing it out as MP3 is a second lossy pass. On speech it is hard to notice. On carefully recorded music it is a real if modest step down. There is no option here to copy the original track through untouched, every export goes through the encoder at 128 kbps.
What the MP3 opens in, and what it will not do
MP3 is the safest audio format there is. Any phone, any car stereo with a USB port, any podcast app, Windows and Android without a codec argument, and every transcription and editing tool you are likely to feed it to. That is the whole reason to prefer it over the AAC track sitting inside the MOV. What it cannot do is stand in for the video, and there are three limits worth knowing before you start.
No picture, and no way back to one. An MP3 holds sound and a tag block, nothing else, so slides, faces and anything written on a whiteboard are lost from that copy.
One MP3 per file, even when the MOV carries more. A camera that recorded its onboard mic and a lav on separate tracks gives you a single MP3 from one of them, not a file per track.
It cannot cut anything down. If you want the middle four minutes of a lecture, extract the whole recording here and trim it in an audio editor afterwards, because there is no trimming, fading or editing in this tool.
MOV to MP3 in three steps
All three happen on your own machine.
Add your recordings
Drop in up to 20 files at 1 GB each, or browse your device. Hand it something that is not a MOV, an MP4 straight off a phone or an MKV from a screen recorder, and it is converted anyway and labelled for whatever actually arrived.
The audio is encoded here
The To selector is already set to MP3 on this page. If you decide you want the picture after all, switch it to MP4 without leaving the page and run the file again.
Save the MP3
Take each file from its result card or download the batch as a zip. No watermark, no tone on the front, no account to make first.
What people bring MOV files here for
These recordings tend to have one thing in common: they were made on Apple hardware by someone who was not thinking about formats at the time.
Voice memos that were recorded as video
Someone opens the camera app because it is the icon their thumb lands on, and a forty minute conversation ends up as a MOV with a shot of a ceiling attached. Extracting the audio leaves you with the part that was ever going to be listened to.
Interviews shot on a phone
A phone on a stand is now the default recorder for research interviews, podcast guests and vox pops. Journalists and researchers rarely need the footage, they need something a transcription service will accept and something small enough to keep hold of.
Lectures and long talks
A recorded class or conference session is mostly one person speaking. As an MP3 it fits on a phone, plays in the car and can be listened to at double speed in any podcast app, none of which is comfortable with a multi gigabyte MOV.
Mac screen recordings with narration
QuickTime and the built in screen recorder both write MOV. When the valuable part of a walkthrough or a bug report is the commentary, pulling the audio out gives you something to write notes from or hand to an editor without shipping the whole capture.
Interviews and lectures are not files to hand to a stranger
The recordings that arrive on this page are often things people have promised to look after: a research interview under a consent form, a client call, a classroom, a medical or legal conversation, a screen recording with an inbox visible in the corner. Uploading that to an unknown converter to save a step is a poor exchange, and it is the step this page removes.
Nothing about this page has anywhere to keep your audio. The decoder and the MP3 encoder are both compiled to WebAssembly and both run in the tab, so there is no server that ever holds a copy, no retention window to read about and no list of past jobs sitting behind a login. Refresh the page and the work is simply gone.
What that means in practice
- The MOV never leaves your device
- We never see the audio or even the file name
- No account, no watermark, no tone spliced into the MP3
- It runs on your own CPU, so a long recording takes a few minutes
MOV to MP3 troubleshooting
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Add the MOV at the top of this page, let the audio track encode, then save the MP3. It runs in your browser, so there is no upload, no signup and no watermark on the result.
Last reviewed on 15 August 2026 for browser-based audio extraction.