MOV to MP3 Converter

iPhones, iPads, Macs and many cameras save video as MOV, Apple's QuickTime format. To keep just the sound — a voice memo you filmed, a speech, a rehearsal or a live song — this tool saves it as an MP3 that plays on any phone, car stereo or music app. iPhone MOV files carry AAC sound, which your browser decodes itself in seconds (Chrome and Edge also decode the uncompressed PCM sound of many cameras); sound the browser cannot decode goes through the ffmpeg engine instead, a one-time download of about 30 MB. The video is never uploaded.

How to use this tool

1. Choose one or more MOV files (MP4 and M4V also work).
2. Pick the MP3 quality: 192 kbps suits music, 128 kbps or mono is plenty for speech.
3. Optionally enter a start and end time to keep only part of the sound.
4. Press Calculate, listen to the result and download it (several files come as one ZIP).

Formula

MP3 size ≈ bitrate (kbps) × 1000 ÷ 8 × length (seconds)

The sound is decoded and re-encoded with the LAME MP3 encoder. iPhone recordings are usually 44.1 or 48 kHz AAC and keep their sample rate. Surround or spatial-audio tracks are mixed down to stereo, because MP3 holds at most two channels. The file name becomes the MP3's title tag.

Example

A 3-minute iPhone video of a concert, converted at 256 kbps: 256,000 ÷ 8 × 180 = 5,760,000 bytes, about 5.5 MB. The same MOV file may be 400 MB because of the 4K video — the MP3 keeps only the sound.