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
    Conquering Impostor Syndrome

    Two years ago I documented my struggles with Imposter Syndrome and the response was immense.  I received messages of support and commiseration from new web developers, veteran engineers, and even persons of all experience levels in other professions.  I've even caught myself reading the post...

  • By
    fetch API

    One of the worst kept secrets about AJAX on the web is that the underlying API for it, XMLHttpRequest, wasn't really made for what we've been using it for.  We've done well to create elegant APIs around XHR but we know we can do better.  Our effort to...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Pure CSS Slide Up and Slide Down

    If I can avoid using JavaScript for element animations, I'm incredibly happy and driven to do so.  They're more efficient, don't require a JavaScript framework to manage steps, and they're more elegant.  One effect that is difficult to nail down with pure CSS is sliding up...

  • By
    Create a Photo Stack Effect with Pure CSS Animations or MooTools

    My favorite technological piece of Google Plus is its image upload and display handling.  You can drag the images from your OS right into a browser's DIV element, the images upload right before your eyes, and the albums page displays a sexy photo deck animation...

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!