When you need the audio, not the video
Plenty of recordings end up as video even though the picture does not matter: a lecture captured on a phone, an interview recorded over a video call, a voice memo saved as a screen recording, a podcast segment clipped from a longer episode. Keeping the full video wastes storage and makes the file awkward to play on the go. Extracting the audio into an MP3 gives you something any music or podcast app can play, at a fraction of the size.
How the extraction works
Drop in an MP4, MOV, or WebM file and the tool decodes it with the media codecs already built into your browser — the same hardware-accelerated ones that play video on every site you visit. The audio track is then encoded to MP3 by a small LAME encoder compiled to WebAssembly, running entirely on your own machine. Because there is no server involved, a long recording starts converting the moment you add it: no upload progress bar, no queue, and no counter ticking down your free tasks for the day.
Choosing a bitrate
The tool offers 128, 192, and 320 kbps. For speech — lectures, interviews, meetings — 128 kbps is usually indistinguishable from the source and keeps files small. 192 kbps is a sensible middle ground for mixed content. Save 320 kbps for music, where the extra detail is audible; for a one-hour talk it mostly just triples the file size. Whatever you pick, the original video is left untouched.