How to remove the audio from a video without losing quality
You filmed something good and in the background there is a TV, someone else’s conversation, or a song you cannot publish. The picture works; the sound does not.
4 minute read
First: this should not damage your video
Most sites that strip audio do something unnecessary: they decode the whole video and encode it again. That takes minutes, heats up your phone and, above all, leaves the picture worse than the original, because every re-encode loses detail. Many also stamp a watermark or trim the length to push you towards paying.
None of that is needed. A video is a container holding two things separately: picture and sound. Removing the sound means writing the file again while copying the picture exactly as it is. That is why the result is identical frame for frame and takes seconds rather than minutes.
How to do it
Open the remove audio tool and drag your video in. MP4, M4V and MOV all work, which is what phones and cameras record.
Press “Remove audio”. You will see the progress; on a normal video it is a matter of seconds.
Download the result. It comes out with no watermark, at the same resolution and the same length as the original.
Do you only want the background music gone, keeping the voices?
Worth being clear here, because this is the most common confusion. A recording does not store music on one side and voices on the other: it all arrives mixed into a single track, like a sauce already made. Separating speech from music afterwards is a different problem, it needs AI processing and does not always come out clean: it tends to leave the voice metallic or echoing.
Our tool does not do that: it removes the entire sound track and leaves your video silent.
That said, for the most frequent case — a copyrighted song that will get your post taken down — removing all the audio and laying royalty-free music over it in your editor is faster and comes out better than any separation attempt.
Which one you actually want
- Posting on social without a takedown: strip the audio and add royalty-free music in the platform’s own editor.
- A private conversation slipped in: remove it entirely. It is the only thing that guarantees nothing is audible.
- You are adding a voice-over: strip it first, so it does not compete with the narration.
- You want the sound and not the video: that is the opposite, and the extract audio tool saves it as MP3.
- It is just too heavy: removing audio saves little. What really cuts the size is compressing the video.
How much smaller it gets
It depends on how much the sound track weighed, which in a normal video runs between 5% and 15% of the file. On a 100 MB phone video, expecting around 90 MB is realistic. If what you need is for it to fit in an email, removing the audio alone will not save you: compress the video.
If your video is not MP4
With AVI, WEBM, MKV or WMV, convert it to MP4 first with the converter and then remove the sound. Two steps, but they work.
There is one more case we will warn you about if it happens: some videos, especially those downloaded from social media in segments, store their frames spread out in a way we cannot yet rewrite without truncating the video. Rather than hand you an incomplete file, we say so and suggest converting it to MP4 first.
About your video
A personal video is among the most private things you can upload to a website. Here your files are never uploaded to a server: we do not receive them at any point, so no copy is left to delete afterwards.