How to extract audio from a video on an iPhone

There are four ways to do this on an iPhone and they are not equally good. Here is what each one costs you, and where the quality actually goes.

The video is in Photos. You want the sound from it — a lecture you recorded, a song someone filmed, a voice you want to keep — and you do not want to email the whole thing to a computer to get it. There are four ways to do this on an iPhone. Here is what each one actually gives you.

The short answer

If you want it once and quickly: save the video to Files, then open this page in Safari and drop it in. If you want it often: either build the Shortcut described below, which is free and takes five minutes, or install an app that does it in two taps. Photos itself cannot do it, and iMovie on the iPhone cannot either — that second one is the reason most people end up searching.

Why the Photos app cannot help

Photos edits video: trim, crop, filters, rotate. There is no "export audio" anywhere in it, and there never has been. The same is true of the Files app, which will happily show you a video's size and let you rename it, but has no idea what is inside.

That is not an oversight so much as a design choice — Apple treats a video as one object, and everything that pulls it apart lives in another app. Which of those you use is the whole question.

Route 1: the Shortcuts app (free, built in)

Shortcuts has an action called Encode Media with an Audio Only switch. Turn that on and it does exactly what this page is about: it takes the soundtrack out of a video and saves it on its own.

1. Open Shortcuts and tap + to create a new one.
2. Add the action Select Photos (or Get File if your videos live in Files).
3. Add Encode Media. Tap the arrow to expand it, then turn on Audio Only.
4. Add Save File, and choose where it should land.
5. Name the shortcut and run it.

Two things nobody mentions. The file you get is an .m4a, not an MP3 — Shortcuts has no MP3 encoder, and there is no setting that changes this. And because the audio inside an iPhone video is AAC, that .m4a is essentially a copy: the quality is exactly what was in the video. So the Shortcut is genuinely good, as long as M4A is a format you can use. The full walkthrough, including what to do when it fails, is here.

Route 2: this page, in Safari

The extractor on this site runs inside the browser, so it works on a phone too — with one honest caveat. The engine is a 32 MB download, and Safari on iOS gives a tab much less memory than a desktop browser does, so on older iPhones it sometimes will not start at all. When that happens the page says so rather than hanging.

When it does work, the sequence is:

1. In Photos, open the video, tap Share, then Save to Files. (This step matters: the browser's file picker can reach Files, and reaches Photos less reliably.)
2. Open the extractor, tap the box and choose the video from Files.
3. Pick MP3 for compatibility or M4A to keep the audio untouched, then extract.
4. The download lands in Files, under Downloads.

Nothing is uploaded in the process. That is not a promise about a privacy policy: the page cannot send your video anywhere, because its Content Security Policy blocks outbound connections. You can put the phone in airplane mode after the page loads and it still works.

Route 3: the app

This is the one to use if the answer is "regularly". Video to Audio Converter reads the video straight out of the camera roll, so there is no Save-to-Files step, and it converts on the device with no network at all.

1. Open the app and tap Gallery (or Files if the video is there).
2. Pick the video. It appears with its length and size.
3. Choose MP3, M4A, AAC or WAV, and a bitrate — 192 kbps is the sensible default, 64 or 96 is plenty for a lecture.
4. Tap Convert to Audio. The finished file appears in History, where you can play it, share it or save it to Files.

Two limits, stated plainly: it converts one video at a time, and it gives you one free conversion before asking for a subscription. If you have a folder of recordings to get through, the queue on this website is the better tool and costs nothing.

Route 4: iMovie, and why it disappoints

iMovie on the iPhone can detach audio — drop the video on the timeline, tap it, and the audio becomes its own strip you can move or delete. What it cannot do is export that strip on its own: every share option produces a video file. On a Mac, iMovie can (File → Share → File → Format: Audio Only), which is why half the advice on the internet about this does not work on the device it was written for.

If you have already edited in iMovie on the phone and just want the sound, export the video as usual and then run the export through any of the three routes above. The iMovie details are here.

What you should expect quality-wise

An iPhone records AAC audio at around 128–160 kbps. That has two consequences worth knowing:

• M4A costs nothing. The AAC is copied out untouched, so the extracted file is exactly the audio from the video.
• MP3 costs a little. The AAC is decoded and re-encoded, which is inaudible on one pass at 192 kbps, but is not free.
• 320 kbps is a waste. You cannot add detail that was never recorded; you only add megabytes. Match the source or go below it.

The long version of that argument is here, with the measurements behind it.

When it goes wrong

"There is no audio in this file." Some recordings genuinely have none — screen recordings made without the microphone, for example. Play the video first: if it is silent there, nothing can recover sound that was never captured.

The file will not open, or stops halfway. If the video lives in iCloud Photos and your phone is set to optimise storage, what is on the device may be a placeholder. Open the video in Photos and let it download fully first.

Safari runs out of memory. A long 4K video in a phone browser is the case this happens to. The app has no such ceiling, because it is not working inside a tab.