Where MOV files come from
MOV is Apple's QuickTime container. iPhones and iPads record video as MOV, the screen recorder on a Mac saves MOV, and QuickTime Player writes MOV whenever you record the screen or a webcam. Many cameras from Canon, Nikon, Panasonic, Blackmagic and others use it too, and Final Cut Pro exports MOV by default.
That is why a lot of spoken material ends up inside a MOV: a lecture filmed on an iPhone, an interview recorded on a camera, a demo captured with the Mac screen recorder, or a talk exported from Final Cut. Often you only need the audio from those files, to listen on the move, to send someone the talk without the footage, or to hand the recording to a tool that does not open video.
What is inside a MOV, and why the MP3 is so much smaller
A MOV file is a wrapper around separate video and audio tracks. The video track is usually H.264 or HEVC from a phone or camera, or ProRes from an editor. The audio track is usually AAC, and sometimes uncompressed PCM, which is what cameras and ProRes exports often carry.
Converting MOV to MP3 reads only the audio track, decodes it and encodes it as MP3. The video is discarded, and the video is nearly all of the file size. A 2 GB MOV of a 20-minute talk becomes an MP3 of around 30 MB at 192 kbps. The converter still has to read the whole MOV from disk, so a big file takes longer to process than a small one, but the output will be a fraction of the size.
If the audio track is AAC, you are going from one lossy format to another and a little detail is lost. For speech it is not something you will notice. If the audio track is PCM, the MP3 is the first compression applied, and choosing a higher bitrate keeps more of it.
Choosing the bitrate
The MP3 is encoded with LAME at a constant bitrate. The default of 192 kbps is a sensible middle ground. Here is when to change it.
- 128 kbps: speech. Lectures, interviews, meetings and voice notes sound fine at this rate, and the file is a third smaller than at 192 kbps. Good for email and chat apps with attachment limits.
- 192 kbps: the default. Clear speech with room to spare, and acceptable for music and ambient sound. Choose it when you are not sure.
- 320 kbps: music, live performances and anything you plan to edit again later. The file is larger, but the least detail is lost.
Nothing is uploaded
The converter is FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly, running in the page. Your MOV never leaves your device and nothing is stored on our side, which matters when the recording is a private meeting or an unreleased edit. On first use the browser downloads the conversion engine, about 32 MB, and caches it. After that the converter also works offline.
Files up to about 2 GB work on a desktop or laptop. Phones and tablets manage smaller files, because the browser has less memory available. A long ProRes export is best converted on a Mac rather than on the iPhone that shot the original. Current Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari 16 or newer are supported.
The output keeps the original name with an .mp3 extension. Press Download to save it. The result only exists in the open tab, so save it before you reload. There is no sign-up and no watermark, and you can convert as many files as you want, one at a time. Only local files work: a link to a video on YouTube or TikTok cannot be converted.
What to do with the MP3
MP3 plays almost anywhere: car stereos, older music players, podcast apps, and chat apps that reject video attachments. An iPhone video of a lecture becomes a file you can listen to on a run, and a Mac screen recording of a meeting becomes something you can drop into a shared folder without the footage.
If you want the audio for editing rather than listening, MP3 is the wrong choice because it is lossy. Use the extract audio from video page instead and pick M4A, which copies an AAC track without re-encoding, or WAV for an uncompressed file that any editor opens directly.
If you actually need the words
When the MOV is a lecture, an interview or a meeting, the sound is often just a step on the way to a transcript. After the conversion, press Transcribe this file and the MP3 goes into the transcription box further down this page. That step runs on our servers, so the audio is uploaded for processing. You get a timestamped, editable transcript in 90 or more languages, with exports to TXT, DOCX, PDF, SRT, VTT and CSV, and you can try it without an account. The SRT and VTT exports can go straight back into your video editor as subtitles for the original MOV.