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
    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
    Introducing MooTools Templated

    One major problem with creating UI components with the MooTools JavaScript framework is that there isn't a great way of allowing customization of template and ease of node creation. As of today, there are two ways of creating: new Element Madness The first way to create UI-driven...

  • By
    Checkbox Filtering Using MooTools ElementFilter

    When I first wrote MooTools ElementFilter, I didn't think much of it. Fast forward eight months later and I've realized I've used the plugin a billion times. Hell, even one of the "big 3" search engines is using it for their maps application.

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!