How to Extract Audio From a Video on iPhone

If you have a video on your iPhone and you only want the sound, you have four real options. One is free and already on your phone. One takes a single tap. Two are worse than they look.

Here is the short version.

Method	Cost	Where it runs	Effort
Shortcuts (built into iOS)	Free	On your device	Build it once, then one tap
Decant	Free to try, $4.99 once	On your device	One tap
iMovie	Free	On your device	High, and no audio-only export
Online converters	Free with ads	Someone else’s server	Upload, wait, download

Method 1: The Shortcuts app (free, built into iOS)

iOS ships with an action called Encode Media that has an Audio Only toggle. Almost nobody knows it exists. It works, it is free, and nothing leaves your phone.

You build the shortcut once, then it lives in your share sheet forever.

1. Open the Shortcuts app and tap + to create a new shortcut.
2. Tap Add Action, search for Encode Media, and select it.
3. Tap the arrow next to “Shortcut Input” to expand the action’s options, then turn on Audio Only.
4. While the options are open, check Format. It defaults to M4A. You can switch it to AIFF or WAV if you want lossless.
5. Tap Add Action again, search for Save File, and add it. This is what actually writes the audio to your Files app.
6. Tap the shortcut’s name at the top, choose Details, and enable Show in Share Sheet. Set it to accept Media.
7. Name it something you will recognize, like “Get Audio,” and save.

To use it: open a video in Photos or Files, tap Share, scroll to your shortcut, and tap it. Pick where to save the file.

Where it runs out of road. It is fiddly to set up, the share sheet step is easy to mis-configure, it handles one video at a time, and the saved file is named whatever the shortcut decides rather than keeping the video’s name. If you do this once a year, it is the right answer. If you do it weekly, the friction adds up.

Method 2: A single-purpose app

This is the part where we tell you what we make, so treat it accordingly.

Decant does exactly this one thing. You drop in a video from Photos, Files, or the share sheet and it hands back the audio. It runs entirely on your iPhone, nothing is uploaded, there is no timeline to fight, and your file keeps the original video’s name instead of a string of numbers. It exports M4A, WAV, and AIFF, and it can batch a pile of videos at once.

The first three extractions are free. Unlimited is a one-time $4.99, not a subscription.

If the Shortcut above covers your needs, use the Shortcut. It is genuinely free and it genuinely works. Decant exists because building and maintaining that Shortcut is a chore, and because doing this at any volume through the share sheet is slow.

Method 3: iMovie (this one disappoints people)

iMovie is free, it is from Apple, and it is the first thing most people try. It is also the wrong tool here, for a reason that is not obvious until you are twenty minutes in.

On iPhone, iMovie can detach audio from a video clip. Select the clip on the timeline, tap the actions button, and choose Detach. The audio becomes its own track.

What iMovie for iPhone cannot do is export that audio on its own. There is no audio-only export in the iOS version. The Mac version has one (File → Share → File, then choose Audio Only), but that option was never brought over to iPhone or iPad. So you detach the audio, delete the video track, and then discover that the only thing you can export is still a video file.

If you have a Mac, iMovie there is a perfectly good answer. On an iPhone alone, it is a dead end.

Method 4: Online converters

Search results are full of sites that will convert a video to audio in your browser. They work. The trade-off is not subtle: you are uploading your video to a stranger’s server, waiting for it to process, and downloading the result. On cellular, with a long video, that is slow and expensive.

If the video is something you would not email to a stranger, do not upload it to one. For anything private (a recorded conversation, a medical appointment, footage of your kids) use one of the on-device methods above.

Which format should you pick?

Most people over-think this. Short version:

• M4A is the right default. It is AAC audio in a modern container, it sounds better than MP3 at the same file size, and it plays natively on every Apple device and virtually every modern player.
• WAV and AIFF are uncompressed. Pick one of these if you are handing the audio to an editor, a DAW, or a transcription workflow that wants a clean source. Files are large, roughly 10 MB per minute.
• MP3 is what people ask for out of habit. iOS has no built-in MP3 encoder, so on-device tools generally cannot produce one. In practice you almost never need it. We wrote about when MP3 actually matters if you want the longer answer.

What about the audio in a video you did not shoot?

The mechanics are the same regardless of where the video came from. The legal question is not. Extracting the audio from your own footage is uncontroversial. Extracting a song from someone else’s video and republishing it is copyright infringement in most of the world, whatever tool you use. Personal-use copying of material you already have legitimate access to varies by country and is worth a minute of your own research if you are unsure.