MOV to MP3
Nothing is uploaded. The conversion runs here, on this device.
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What this does
MOV is Apple’s QuickTime container: what an iPhone camera records into, and what QuickTime Player, Final Cut and iMovie write. Inside sit a video track, an audio track that is nearly always AAC, and often timecode and chapter data — and the picture accounts for almost the whole of the file size.
A MOV holds video as well as sound, and on an iPhone it is simply what the camera produces. This pulls the audio track out and leaves the picture behind.
Why the MP3 comes out a fraction of the size
A minute of iPhone video runs to tens of megabytes; a minute of MP3 at 192 kbps is about 1.4. You are not compressing the file so much as discarding the part of it that was large. What remains is a second lossy pass: the audio in a MOV has already been encoded as AAC once, so re-encoding it to MP3 loses a little more. At 192 kbps or above that difference stays inaudible on ordinary playback. Converting does not touch the original — the MOV on your device is exactly as it was, video and all.
Nothing is uploaded
The conversion happens inside this page. Your file is read by the browser, converted here, and saved straight back to your downloads. It is never sent to a server, so there is no upload wait and no size cap beyond what your own device can hold.
Open your browser’s developer tools, switch to the network panel, and convert a file. You will see the converter itself download once, and no upload of your audio at all. That is the whole difference between this and a site that converts on a server, and what that difference actually means is worth a read.
The first conversion is slower
The converter is about 32 MB and downloads the first time you use it, which is the one moment this page is not instant. After that it is cached, and later conversions start immediately, even offline. So do later visits.
Questions
Is this how I pull the audio out of an iPhone video?
Yes. An iPhone records .MOV, and the sound inside it is an AAC track sitting next to the picture. This extracts that track and writes it as MP3. The file never leaves your device, which matters more than usual for video you filmed yourself.
What is the difference between MOV and MP4?
MOV is Apple’s QuickTime container; MP4 is the ISO standard that grew out of it. They are close relatives, and the audio inside both is usually AAC — which is why the two convert here in exactly the same way.
My MOV has more than one audio track. Which one do I get?
One track comes out: the one a player would use by default. A file exported from an editing timeline can carry several, and if you need a specific alternate track, an editor is the tool for that rather than a converter.