Convert Video to mp3

By  on  

Let's all be honest for a moment:  we've all ... not paid for ... music.  Whether it was via a file sharing app like Kazaa or Napster, or it was downloading and seeding on bittorrent, or maybe even downloading a music video and ripping its audio, we've all pulled some "gangsta shit" to get a track or two.  You should only feel ashamed if it was Nickleback.  And hey, there are times when you legitimately want to pull audio from a video...though I can't think of any.

If you do want to pull the audio of a video file, for whatever reason, you can do so easily with ffmpeg.  Let's use ffmpeg to take a downloaded YouTube video and rip its audio into and MP3:

ffmpeg -i music-video.webm -vn -ar 44100 -ac 2 -ab 192 -f mp3 music.mp3

Using the command above, we take the source video and output its audio to mp3 with a 192kb/s bitrate.

There are in-browser tools and websites you can use to rip audio from YouTube or other video files, but ffmpeg is quick, simple, and hassle free. You can also replace "mp3" with other audio formats if you so choose!

Recent Features

  • By
    How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam

    I love almost every part of being a tech blogger:  learning, preaching, bantering, researching.  The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe:  dealing with SPAM comments.  For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day.  PER DAY.  Bloating my database...

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    HTML5’s placeholder Attribute

    HTML5 has introduced many features to the browser;  some HTML-based, some in the form of JavaScript APIs, but all of them useful.  One of my favorites if the introduction of the placeholder attribute to INPUT elements.  The placeholder attribute shows text in a field until the...

  • By
    dwClickable:  Entire Block Clickable Using MooTools 1.2

    I recently received an email from a reader who was really impressed with Block Clickable, a jQuery script that took the link within a list item and made the entire list item clickable. I thought it was a neat script so I...

Discussion

  1. Joe

    In case anybody is not into command line, there is a UI for this conversion,
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-converter-and-muxer/

  2. Suneel

    Thanks for saving my time!

    "ffmpeg -i music-video.webm -vn -ar 44100 -ac 2 -ab 192 -f mp3 music.mp3" above command helped to convert video to audio (Ubuntu machine).

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!