Remove Sound From a Video

Why remove the sound from a video?

Removing the soundtrack comes in handy in many situations: a vacation video where all you hear is the wind, private conversations or an awkward comment; a screen recording full of keyboard clicks; copyrighted music that could get your post blocked or muted on social media; a video playing on loop on a lobby screen or as a website background, where sound has no place. Removing the audio track, rather than just muting playback, guarantees nobody can turn it back on: it simply no longer exists in the file.

No quality loss: what the tool actually does

A video bundles several tracks in a container (MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV): a video track and, usually, an audio track. To make the video silent, the tool copies the video track as is and leaves the audio out, without recompressing anything. The result: no loss of quality, very fast processing and a slightly smaller file. The space saved matches the size of the sound: an AAC track at 128 kbps takes up about 0.96 MB per minute, or nearly 10 MB for a 10-minute video. If you choose to lower the volume instead, only the audio track is re-encoded; the picture stays intact.

Keep the audio separately or edit the video further

Removing the sound is just one edit among others. To save a video's audio as a separate file, such as a song or an interview, use “Convert MP4 to MP3”. To shorten the clip before sharing it, try “Cut / Trim Video”; to shrink it below a messaging app's size limit, use “Compress Video”. A muted video can also become a lightweight animation with “Video to GIF”. Tip: always keep the original, because once the audio track is removed, there's no way to get it back from the muted file.