ALL VIDEO TOOLS23
Video to WAV
Convert Video to WAV Online — Free Audio Extractor
Extract a video's audio track as an uncompressed WAV file, ready for an editor.
About Video to WAV
Audio software wants WAV. Digital audio workstations, transcription engines, forensic tools, subtitle timing software and most speech-to-text pipelines all expect uncompressed PCM, and several of them will reject a compressed file rather than decode it for you. Video files hardly ever carry uncompressed audio — the track inside is normally AAC, Opus, Vorbis, AC-3 or MP3, compressed to keep the file small — so getting from one to the other means decoding the track and writing the samples out uncompressed. That is what this tool does. Drop in an MP4, WebM, MOV, AVI or MKV and it demuxes the audio stream, decodes it, and writes a standard 16-bit WAV at the track's own sample rate. Two honest points about what that means. Decoding to WAV does not recover anything the original encoder discarded; the file is lossless from this point forward, not lossless all the way back. And it is big: expect roughly 10 MB per minute of stereo, so a two-hour recording lands over a gigabyte. If you only need something to listen to, the MP3 arm of the audio extractor is a far smaller file; WAV earns its size when the audio is going into a tool that needs samples rather than sound. FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly does the work in this tab and the video is never uploaded.
Questions
Why would I want a WAV rather than an MP3?
Because audio software expects uncompressed PCM. Digital audio workstations, transcription engines, forensic tools and subtitle timing software all want samples rather than a compressed approximation, and several of them refuse a compressed file outright. If you only want something to listen to, MP3 is a much smaller file and the audio extractor offers it.
How big will the WAV be?
About 10 MB per minute of stereo audio, regardless of how small the video was. A 30-minute talk lands near 300 MB and a two-hour film goes over a gigabyte. The whole file is built in the browser tab before you can download it, so very long recordings can run a tab out of memory even though the video itself costs nothing to read.
Does converting to WAV improve the audio?
No. The audio in a video is already compressed — AAC, Opus, Vorbis, AC-3 or MP3 — and decoding it to WAV recovers nothing that encoder discarded. What you get is a lossless working copy, so every edit and export after this point adds no further damage.
What sample rate does the WAV use?
The audio track's own, usually 44.1 or 48 kHz, written as 16-bit PCM. Nothing is resampled on the way through, so the timing matches the video exactly — which matters when the WAV is going into subtitle or transcription work.
Which video formats does this accept?
MP4, WebM, MOV, AVI and MKV. FFmpeg picks its demuxer from the file extension, so leave the name intact. The video track is discarded entirely — only the audio stream is read — which is why the run is fast even on a large file.
Is my file uploaded to a server?
No. Transmute processes everything locally in your browser using JavaScript and WebAssembly. Your files never leave your device — there is no server, no upload, no cloud processing.