How to extract audio from a video on Android

You do not need to install anything: Chrome on Android runs this page's extractor on the phone itself. Here is how, and where it runs out of road.

Search for this on an Android phone and you get a wall of apps, most of them wrapped in advertising and several of them uploading your video to a server you have never heard of. You do not need any of them: Chrome on Android can do the job on the phone itself.

The route that needs no app

Chrome on Android supports WebAssembly and the File System APIs this page uses, so the extractor runs on the phone exactly as it does on a laptop.

1. Open the extractor in Chrome.
2. Tap the box. Android's picker opens — choose Files or Gallery and pick the video.
3. Choose MP3 (or M4A to keep the original audio untouched) and tap Extract.
4. The file lands in your Downloads folder, where any music player or file manager can see it.

The engine is a 32 MB download the first time, cached afterwards, and everything runs locally: put the phone in airplane mode after the page has loaded and it still works. On a mid-range phone, a ten-minute video takes a minute or so to convert to MP3 — and seconds if you pick M4A, because then the audio is copied rather than re-encoded.

On Samsung phones specifically

Two things differ on One UI. Samsung Internet works for this as well as Chrome, so you do not have to switch browsers. And Samsung's Gallery has a "Save as audio" option on some models for its own recordings — if you see it, it produces an M4A and it is fine.

What Samsung does not have is anything that reaches into a downloaded film or a video someone sent you. That is the gap this page fills.

Videos that arrived in a messaging app

WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal all save received videos to the phone once you have played or downloaded them, usually under Internal storage → Android → media → … or in a folder named after the app. The picker can reach them: tap the box, switch the picker to Files rather than Gallery, and browse.

WhatsApp video is heavily compressed — often 64–96 kbps AAC — so extract at a matching bitrate rather than 320 kbps, which would triple the size without adding anything. More on WhatsApp videos here.

Which format to choose on a phone

• MP3 if the file is going anywhere else — a car stereo, an old speaker, someone else's phone.
• M4A if it is staying on the phone. Android has played M4A for well over a decade, and for a video filmed on a phone it is a straight copy: no re-encode, no loss, seconds rather than minutes.
• WAV only if something specifically demands it. It is roughly ten megabytes per minute, which fills a phone quickly.

Making it a ringtone

Extract an MP3, then either move it into the Ringtones folder in internal storage, or open Settings → Sound and vibration → Phone ringtone and use the + / Add button to pick the file. Samsung, Pixel and Xiaomi each word that menu slightly differently, but all three accept an ordinary MP3 from Downloads.

If you want only part of the video's audio, use the ringtone page first: it lets you scrub the video and take a section, rather than cutting the file afterwards.

Is there an Android app for this?

Ours is not on Google Play at the moment — the app is iPhone-only today. Rather than pretend otherwise: on Android, the browser route above is the one we would recommend even if the app existed, because it involves no install, no advertising and no upload.

If you do go looking for an app, the thing to check is whether it converts on the device or uploads. An app that needs an internet connection to convert a file that is already on your phone is telling you where your video is going.

When it does not work

The picker will not show the video. Switch it from Gallery to Files. Some file managers hide app-specific folders from the media picker but show them in the file browser.

Chrome runs out of memory. Close other tabs and try again, or extract a section rather than the whole recording. Phones have far less room per tab than a desktop.

The download does not appear. Check Chrome's Downloads list rather than the Files app — some Android versions keep browser downloads in a separate place until you move them.