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
    JavaScript Promise API

    While synchronous code is easier to follow and debug, async is generally better for performance and flexibility. Why "hold up the show" when you can trigger numerous requests at once and then handle them when each is ready?  Promises are becoming a big part of the JavaScript world...

  • 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
    Record Text Selections Using MooTools or jQuery AJAX

    One technique I'm seeing more and more these days (CNNSI.com, for example) is AJAX recording of selected text. It makes sense -- if you detect users selecting the terms over and over again, you can probably assume your visitors are searching that term on Google...

  • By
    iPhone-Style Passwords Using MooTools PassShark

    Every once in a while I come across a plugin that blows me out of the water and the most recent culprit is PassShark: a MooTools plugin that duplicates the iPhone's method of showing/hiding the last character in a password field. This gem of...

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!