Audio Converter

A voice memo. An interview you recorded, a call, a lecture, a family video with someone talking in it. That's what people actually feed an audio converter. And most converter sites send that file up to a server you've never heard of, process it there, and hand it back. That is fine for a photo of a sunset, but a recording of a person saying something they didn't expect a stranger to hear is a bad trade, and nobody tells you you're making it.

This converter never sends your file anywhere. Drop in an audio or video file, pick WAV or OGG, and the whole conversion runs on your own device. No upload, no account, no cap on how many files you push through it. As a small bonus, once you've run your first conversion you can kill your internet and it keeps working, because there's nothing left for it to phone home to.

Two things here that a lot of the free converters can't be bothered to do. It takes video, not just audio, so you can pull the sound straight out of a clip in the same box. And it shows you the result in a small player before you download, so you can actually listen and confirm it's right instead of downloading blind and opening it in something else.

1. Drag an audio or video file onto the drop zone, or click to browse and pick one from your computer.
2. Choose your output format. WAV for uncompressed audio that opens in everything, or OGG for a much smaller file that still sounds great.
3. Click Convert. The percentage ticks up as it runs. If you dropped in a video, it grabs the audio track and drops the picture.
4. Play the result in the built-in preview to check it, then click Download to save it.

No queue, no processing spinner stuck at 90 percent, no email verification, no watermark. For a normal few-minute clip it's basically instant. A long recording takes a bit longer, and that time depends on your own machine, not on someone's overloaded server.

You recorded a meeting on video and only need the talking. You filmed a lecture and want an audio version for the drive. There's a song, or a bit of narration, buried in a clip and you want it on its own. Drop the video in, choose a format, and you get back just the sound.

You don't need a separate "video to audio" converter for any of that. A video file is really a container with two streams stacked inside, one picture and one sound, and pulling the audio means keeping the sound stream and throwing the rest away. All of it happens locally, which matters more than usual here, because the videos people actually record are work calls with salary numbers in them, interviews with sources, private conversations. Those really shouldn't be going up to some random server.

Extract to WAV and the output can come out bigger than the original video. Sounds backwards, but the video's picture was already heavily compressed and the WAV audio has none of that compression, so a 200 MB video might give you a 30 MB OGG or a 300 MB WAV of the exact same speech. Extract to OGG unless you specifically plan to edit the audio afterward. For transcription, or just listening on the way somewhere, OGG is the one you want.

This is the only real decision you have to make. WAV writes down every sample of the sound exactly as captured, nothing thrown away, so the quality is perfect and it opens in essentially anything ever built. The cost is size, roughly 10 MB a minute no matter what's in it (even a silent stretch takes that full rate, because every silent sample still gets stored). Reach for WAV when you're feeding audio into an editor or a transcription tool that demands it, or archiving a master you never want to degrade.

OGG uses the Opus codec and it's compressed. It leans on a model of how human hearing works and quietly drops the parts you were never going to catch, which lands you a file often a tenth the size while still sounding clean and full. For anything you'll send, store, or just listen to, OGG is usually the smart pick.

A quick way to choose: go OGG when the file is a finished result you'll just play or share, and pick WAV when you still plan to edit it, since that avoids baking compression into your working copy.

You've probably noticed there's no MP3 button, and the reason is licensing. The MP3 patents themselves have expired, but the encoder that actually makes good-sounding MP3s (a well-known one called LAME) ships under a license we'd rather not build on, and handing you a worse MP3 just to dodge that isn't worth it. Opus is newer than MP3 and generally sounds better at the same size, especially for voice. It's the codec WhatsApp voice notes, Discord, and YouTube all run on. So OGG isn't a step down, in most cases where you'd have grabbed an MP3, an OGG at the same size sounds as good or better. If some stubborn tool flatly demands MP3, convert to WAV here and run that through a dedicated MP3 encoder as the last step.

One habit worth keeping whatever you pick. Hold onto your highest-quality original as the master and do your editing on that, converting down to a smaller format only once, right at the end. Every time you re-encode a compressed file you lose a little more, so you want to do it exactly once.