MP4 to MP3 for Podcasts

Most podcast episodes that started life as video begin here: the interview was recorded on Zoom, Riverside, StreamYard, or a camera, and what you actually need to publish is the audio. Extracting the MP3 gives you the episode without the gigabytes of video you'll never use — and it's the same step whether you're repurposing a livestream, a webinar, or a talking-head interview.

One decision matters more than any other here: what you extract to. If you are going to edit — cut filler words, remove long pauses, level the two speakers, add an intro — extract to WAV rather than MP3, because the audio in an MP4 is already lossy AAC, and re-encoding it to MP3 before you edit stacks a second lossy generation on top of it, before your editor adds a third at export. Decode once to WAV, edit, then export a single MP3 at the end. Use this MP3 extraction when the audio is finished and you just need the publishable file, a reference copy, or something to send to a guest or editor.

For the published file, podcast platforms are consistent: mono or stereo MP3, 128 kbps is the widely used standard for spoken word (64-96 kbps mono is acceptable for pure voice and keeps episode files small), and 192 kbps and above only if there's music you care about. Higher isn't better for speech — it just makes a bigger download for your listeners.

The privacy angle is not incidental for interview material. This extraction runs in your browser with WebAssembly, so an unreleased episode, an embargoed interview, or a guest's recording never gets uploaded to a third-party server — which is not something you can say about most online converters, and something guests increasingly ask about.

Practical workflow: extract the audio here, drop it into your editor (or straight into your hosting platform if the audio is already finished), and archive the original MP4 if you also plan to publish the video version. The MP4 stays untouched — extraction reads it and writes a new file alongside.