You recorded your screen to keep something you heard: a lecture, a meeting, a song playing in an app, a voice message. Now you want the sound on its own, as a file you can play in the car, send, transcribe or edit. A screen recording is a video file, and the sound inside it is already a separate track, so getting it out is quick. The choices that matter are whether to copy that track as it is or convert it to MP3, and what to do when the recording turns out to have no sound or no length at all.
We tested on 10 October 2026 with a 60-second, 60.8 MB phone video (AAC sound at 128 kbps), a screen recording with no sound track, and two recordings made with Chrome's built-in recorder, on Windows 11 with Chrome 154. The iPhone and Mac steps come from Apple's own apps and documentation, not from our device, and we say where that is the case.
The quick answer
| Your recording | Usually saved as | To get the sound |
|---|---|---|
| iPhone or iPad screen recording | .mp4 or .mov in Photos | MP4 to MP3 in the browser, or the Shortcuts app (below) |
| Mac screen recording | .mov | QuickTime Player: File > Export As > Audio Only (gives .m4a), or MP4 to MP3 for an MP3 |
| Windows (Snipping Tool, Xbox Game Bar) | .mp4 | MP4 to MP3, or Extract Audio to copy the sound untouched |
| Browser extension, web app, online meeting | .webm | WebM to MP3 |
Copy the sound, or convert it to MP3?
The sound in an MP4 or MOV screen recording is almost always AAC, the same kind of audio an M4A file holds. That leaves two ways to get it out:
- Copy it. The AAC track is taken out byte for byte and wrapped as an audio file. Nothing is decoded or re-encoded, so there is no quality change at all.
- Convert it to MP3. The sound is decoded and encoded again as MP3. It loses a little, which is hard to hear at a matched bitrate, but MP3 plays on everything: old car stereos, cheap players, upload forms that list MP3 and nothing else.
We did both with the same 60-second phone video:
| 60 s phone video, 60.8 MB | Copy the AAC sound | Convert to MP3 |
|---|---|---|
| File you get | 980 KB (.aac) | 1.20 MB (.mp3, 160 kbps) |
| Time in the browser | 0.07 s | about 2 s |
| Sound | identical to the video's, checked byte for byte | re-encoded, matched to the original's bitrate |
| Plays on | phones, computers, most modern players | everything |
If the file is for you, or for a transcription service or an editor that accepts AAC or M4A, copy it. If you don't know where it will end up, MP3 is the safe choice. Either way the picture is never decoded, which is why a full minute of video takes seconds rather than minutes.
Doing this test turned up a bug in our own copy tool: on videos larger than 8 MB it finished with an empty file, because it started copying before the whole video had been read. It was fixed the same day, and a 60 MB video is now part of its tests.
On an iPhone
Photos has no "save audio" button. The two ways that need no app from the App Store:
- In the browser. Open MP4 to MP3 in Safari, tap the drop area, choose Photo Library and pick the recording. Download the MP3; it goes to the Downloads folder in Files.
- With Shortcuts. Apple's Shortcuts app has an Encode Media action with an Audio Only switch, which turns a video into an M4A file. Make a shortcut with Encode Media (Audio Only on) followed by Save File, then run it from the Share sheet on the recording. We didn't run this on a device; the action and its switch are part of Shortcuts.
On a Mac
Open the recording in QuickTime Player and choose File > Export As > Audio Only. Apple's QuickTime Player guide describes the result as an MPEG-4 audio file, an .m4a with AAC sound. If you need MP3 instead, drop the .mov into MP4 to MP3, which reads MOV files as well.
On Windows
Windows has no built-in "save the audio" command for a video. Screen recordings from the Snipping Tool and the Xbox Game Bar are MP4 files, so MP4 to MP3 or Extract Audio in the browser handle them without installing anything. If you already use VLC, its Media > Convert / Save menu with the Audio - MP3 profile does the same job.
Browser recordings: WebM files with no length
Recordings made inside a browser, by a screen-recorder extension, an online meeting or a website's "record" button, are usually WebM files. They have a quirk: the browser writes the file while you record and never goes back to note how long it turned out. We made two with Chrome's own recorder and opened them in Chrome's player:
| Chrome recording | Length shown | Real length | As MP3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sound only | none (infinite), can't seek | 7.02 s | 7.03 s, 142 KB |
| Screen + sound | none (infinite), can't seek | 7.98 s | 7.98 s, 161 KB |
The sound is all there. WebM to MP3 works the length out from the audio itself, and the MP3 shows its duration and seeks normally. It also says when a WebM was missing its length, so you know the original wasn't damaged.
When there is no sound at all
A common disappointment: the recording plays, but the audio file comes out silent or the converter fails. Often the recording simply has no sound track, because the microphone or the app sound was switched off when it was made. You can't recover sound that was never recorded. MP4 to MP3 checks this first and says so at once; with our silent test video it answered in a quarter of a second, "this video has no sound track", instead of producing a silent MP3.
If a recording has sound but it is very quiet, the microphone may have been picking up the speakers from across the room rather than the app's own audio. That is a recording setting, and worth changing before the next one.
Keeping only the part you need
Screen recordings tend to start with a few seconds of fumbling and end with you reaching for the stop button. Convert first, then cut the MP3 with Trim audio: an audio file is far smaller to handle than the video, and trimming an MP3 there doesn't re-encode the part you keep.
Everything above runs in the browser. Meeting recordings and voice messages are often private, and none of these tools uploads the file.