To convert MP4 to WAV, drop the video above, keep 16-bit PCM and press Convert to WAV. The page decodes the sound track in your browser and writes it as an uncompressed WAV file at the original sample rate. The video is never uploaded, and large files are written straight to disk in Chrome and Edge on a computer.
How to convert MP4 to WAV online
- Add the video. Drop one or more files on the box above, or press Choose MP4 files. MOV, MKV and WebM videos work too.
- Check the sound track. The page lists each sound track with its format, sample rate, channels, duration and language, and shows the size the WAV will have. Pick the track you want when there are several.
- Choose the sample format and channels. 16-bit PCM suits almost every use. Keep all channels, or mix a 5.1 track down to stereo, or to mono for speech.
- Press Convert to WAV. A download link appears when it is done. In Chrome and Edge on a computer, a WAV larger than 200 MB is written straight to a file you choose, so even a long recording fits.
Why convert a video to WAV
WAV holds sound as plain samples, without compression. That makes the files large, but every audio program opens them instantly and nothing is lost when you edit and save again. The usual reasons to pull a WAV out of a video:
- Editing the sound in Audacity, Adobe Audition, Reaper, Logic, Pro Tools or another DAW, for example to clean the dialogue of a recording before putting it back on the video.
- Transcription and subtitles: many speech-to-text tools and services ask for WAV, often 16-bit mono.
- Sampling and music production: a sound from a clip becomes a WAV that any sampler loads.
- Archiving the sound of a recording in a format that every program will read in twenty years.
For listening on a phone or sharing, an MP3 is ten times smaller and sounds the same to most people: use the MP4 to MP3 converter instead.
What happens to your file
An MP4 is a container holding a video stream and one or more compressed sound streams, usually AAC. The page opens the container, reads only the chosen sound stream, decodes it with the browser's own audio decoder (WebCodecs) and writes the decoded samples into a WAV file with a standard RIFF header. The picture is never decoded.
Everything happens on your device: the file is read in small pieces by a background worker and the WAV is built in memory or written to disk. There is no upload, and no copy of your video ends up on a server.
The WAV sounds exactly like the MP4 played back, no better and no worse: decoding is the same step a media player performs. What you gain is a file that stays identical however many times you edit and save it.
16-bit or 32-bit float, sample rate and channels
| Setting | What it does | Choose it for |
|---|---|---|
| 16-bit PCM | Samples rounded to 16-bit integers, the CD standard | Video editors, transcription, players, sharing |
| 32-bit float | The decoder's output as it is, no rounding, no clipping; twice the size | DAWs and audio editors, further processing |
| Keep all channels | Every channel of the track, in the order the browser decodes them; 5.1 and 7.1 files are marked with the standard speaker layout | Surround mixing, archiving |
| Stereo | 5.1 and 7.1 mixed down to two channels; mono and stereo tracks stay as they are | Editors and players that expect two channels |
| Mono | Left and right averaged into one; 5.1 and 7.1 are first mixed down to stereo, so the LFE channel is left out | Speech, transcription, smaller files |
The sample rate stays that of the source, usually 48 kHz for video and 44.1 kHz for music, so nothing is resampled. If a tool needs another rate (16 kHz is common for speech recognition), ffmpeg converts it in the same step: add -ar 16000 -ac 1 to the command the page shows.
How big is a WAV file?
Size is sample rate x channels x bytes per sample x duration, with no compression:
| WAV | Per minute | Per hour |
|---|---|---|
| 48 kHz, stereo, 16-bit | 11.5 MB | 691 MB |
| 44.1 kHz, stereo, 16-bit | 10.6 MB | 635 MB |
| 48 kHz, mono, 16-bit | 5.8 MB | 346 MB |
| 48 kHz, stereo, 32-bit float | 23 MB | 1.38 GB |
| 48 kHz, 5.1, 16-bit | 34.6 MB | 2.07 GB |
A WAV file cannot pass 4 GB, because its header stores sizes on 32 bits. That is about 6 hours of 48 kHz stereo at 16-bit. The page checks this before converting; for longer recordings, choose mono or use ffmpeg with -rf64 auto, which writes the RF64 variant that has no such limit.
Other ways to convert MP4 to WAV
ffmpeg
Free on Windows, macOS and Linux, and the quickest way to convert a whole folder. Each file on this page shows its own command under Same conversion with ffmpeg; the general form is:
ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vn -c:a pcm_s16le audio.wav-vn drops the picture and -c:a pcm_s16le writes 16-bit samples; use pcm_f32le for 32-bit float, and add -ac 1 for mono.
Audacity
Audacity opens MP4 files when its FFmpeg library is installed (Edit, Preferences, Libraries). Open the video, then use File, Export Audio, choose WAV and the encoding. The sound can be edited before exporting.
VLC
In VLC, open Media, Convert / Save, add the MP4 and press Convert / Save. Click the wrench icon next to the profile, choose WAV on the Encapsulation tab, then tick Audio and choose WAV on the Audio codec tab, then give a file name ending in .wav and press Start.
Limits
- Memory. Without writing straight to disk, the WAV is assembled in memory: up to 1 GB on a computer, about 90 minutes of 48 kHz stereo, and 300 MB on a phone or tablet. Chrome and Edge on a computer write anything above 200 MB straight to disk, up to the 4 GB WAV limit.
- Browser decoders. The sound is decoded by your browser, so a format it does not support (often AC-3, E-AC-3 and DTS) cannot be converted here; the page says so and gives the ffmpeg command.
- MPEG-TS and protected files. .ts recordings are not read by this page: first turn the TS file into an MP4 in the browser. Files protected by DRM cannot be converted.
- No resampling. The WAV keeps the sample rate of the source. Use the ffmpeg command with
-arto change it.