MOV to MP3 for Podcasts

A great many podcasts are now recorded as video first: a filmed studio conversation, a Zoom or Riverside session exported from a Mac, an interview shot on a phone. All of those land as MOV, and what gets published is an MP3. Extracting the audio is simply the step where the episode becomes an episode.

The critical choice is what you extract to, and it depends on whether you are done. If editing is still ahead of you — cutting filler, tightening pauses, levelling two speakers who recorded at different volumes, adding music — extract to WAV. MOV audio is normally AAC and therefore already lossy; encoding it to MP3 before you edit adds a second lossy generation before you have touched a fader, and the final export adds a third. Decode once to WAV, edit, and encode the MP3 once at the end. Extract to MP3 here when the audio is finished, or when you need a reference copy, a guest send, or something to hand your editor.

For the published file the norms are settled: 128 kbps stereo is standard, and 64-96 kbps mono is entirely acceptable for pure speech — it halves the download for every listener, which adds up across a back catalogue. Only reach for 192 kbps and above when music genuinely matters to the show.

Two speakers filmed together often end up on one mono track anyway, which makes mono publishing an easy win: if there is no meaningful stereo image, mono at 96 kbps sounds the same as stereo at 192 and is half the size.

Privacy is a real consideration with interview material, and guests increasingly ask. This extraction runs entirely in your browser, so an embargoed episode or a guest's recording is never uploaded to a third-party server. Archive the MOV if you plan to publish the video version too — the file is read, not modified.