Festival crowd silhouetted against a sunset stage, the take that comes home with a music claim on it
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All tools / Remove Audio from Video

Remove Audio from Video.

Remove the audio from a video without re-encoding the picture.

→ Open the muterFree, no account, and your video is never uploaded

How it works.

Take the sound out and keep the picture.

  1. Step 1

    Drag your video in

    Or click to choose a file. It stays on your device.

  2. Step 2

    Pick what goes

    All of it, or only the part you mark.

  3. Step 3

    Save the silent version

    One click, and it downloads.

In detail

Removing the audio from a video is the one edit that costs nothing. The file is a container with a video stream and an audio stream side by side, and taking the sound out means writing a new container with only the first one in it: the video packets are copied across exactly as they are, never decoded, never compressed again, so the picture that comes out is identical to the picture that went in and the file is smaller by precisely the size of the sound. It happens here in your browser, in about the time your disk takes to read the file, with no upload and no watermark. If something downstream insists on a video having an audio track, there is a mode that leaves a silent one in place instead.

What it gives you.

  • The track gone in about a second

    Removing audio needs no encoder at all: the video packets are copied into a new container exactly as they were and the audio ones are left out. Nothing is re-compressed, so the picture that comes out is bit for bit the picture that went in, and the job takes about as long as your disk takes to read the file.

  • A silent track when something wants one

    Instagram, some television playout systems, and a good number of editing timelines treat a video with no audio track as a broken file. So there is a second mode that keeps a track and fills it with digital silence, encoded as AAC in an MP4 or Opus in a WebM at 48 kHz, matching your source's channel count.

  • Silence just the part that has to go

    Mark an in and an out on the waveform and only that span is zeroed. The audio either side of it is re-encoded once at its own bitrate and everything you wanted to keep is still there, which is the difference between fixing a recording and throwing its sound away.

  • A waveform you can aim at

    The span mode draws the real peaks of your audio across the clip, so the conversation, the cough, or the song you are trying to lose is a shape you can see and put the marks around instead of a timecode you have to guess.

  • Any format in, the same format out

    An MP4 comes out an MP4, a WebM comes out a WebM, and a MOV comes out an MP4 because that is the file anything downstream would rather have. Your codecs are not swapped behind your back to make the tool's life easier.

  • Nothing uploaded, no watermark

    The whole thing runs in a worker on this page: the file is opened from your disk, rewritten in memory, and handed back. There is no upload, no account, no queue, and nothing stamped in the corner at any size.

Straight answers.

How do I remove the audio from a video for free, without losing quality?

Drop the file here and take the track out. There is no quality question to answer, because nothing about the picture is touched: the video packets are copied into a new container as they stand and the audio ones are not written, which is a file operation rather than an encode. The output plays anywhere the input played, weighs about a megabyte a minute less, and carries no watermark. Nothing is uploaded either, so the size of your file only matters to your own disk.

Does removing the audio change the video quality?

No, and this is the one operation where that is unambiguously true. A video file is a container holding separate streams of already-compressed video and audio packets. Removing the sound means writing a new container with only the video packets in it, copied across without being decoded or re-encoded, so the picture in the output is identical to the picture in the input down to the byte. The file gets smaller by exactly the size of the audio, which for a typical 128 kbps stereo track is about a megabyte a minute. Nothing else changes.

Why would I want a silent audio track instead of no audio at all?

Because a surprising amount of software refuses a video without one. Instagram has rejected audio-less uploads for years, some broadcast and playout systems will not ingest a file with a missing track, and a number of editing timelines either throw an error or silently drop the clip. Replacing the sound with a generated silent track keeps every one of those happy: the file still says it has audio, that audio is genuinely, measurably nothing, and the cost is a few kilobytes because silence compresses to almost zero.

Can I mute only part of the video?

Yes, and that is the third mode. Mark an in and an out on the waveform and the samples inside that span are set to zero while everything outside it is kept. The picture is still copied untouched, so the only stream that pays anything is the audio, which is decoded, zeroed inside the span, and encoded again in the codec it arrived as when your browser can write it. One audio re-encode at the source's own bitrate is inaudible in practice, and it is the honest price of keeping the rest of the sound.

Will YouTube still flag my video if I remove the audio?

If the music was in the audio track, and the audio track is gone, then there is nothing left for Content ID to match against, and a claim raised against the sound of a video with no sound does not survive. What removing the audio cannot fix is a claim on the picture, which happens if you have used somebody else's footage, and it cannot undo a claim that has already been resolved against you. If only part of your video has music in it, silencing that span is usually the better answer than muting the whole thing: it clears the match and you keep the rest of your sound.

Which formats can it open?

MP4, MOV, MKV, and WebM, which covers phone recordings, screen captures, camera files, and downloads. The container the file arrives in is the container it leaves in, with MOV the one exception because an MP4 is what everything downstream would rather be handed. AVI and the older oddities have to go through the converter first: the browser has no parser for them, so there are no packets to copy in the first place.

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