Remove the Audio Track From a Video File

You recorded your screen to show a colleague how a form works, and the microphone caught the office behind you. You filmed a birthday party and the music in the background is the sort a video site will flag. You want a clip for a website banner that should loop silently. In each case you do not need an editor. You need the picture, exactly as it was, with the sound track taken out.

The short version: drop the video into Mute Video, press Remove sound, and download a silent copy. For common phone and camera files it takes seconds, because the picture is copied rather than re-encoded.

Why it can be so fast, and lossless

A video file is a container holding separate tracks: a picture track and a sound track. Removing the sound does not require touching the picture at all. The tool simply writes a new container with the picture track copied across and the sound track left behind. Nothing is decoded, so nothing is lost. The picture is bit-for-bit what it was, and a long clip takes about as long as it takes to copy a file.

The tool does this whenever it can:

• MP4, MOV and M4V files with H.264 or HEVC picture. That covers almost every phone and camera clip, including iPhone video. The picture is copied, the result is an MP4, and HEVC clips keep the tag that Apple devices need to play them.
• WebM files with VP8, VP9 or AV1 picture are copied into a WebM.
• MKV files are copied into an MKV.

One more detail makes phone clips work well. Phones often add small "data" tracks, such as motion or location tracks, that the MP4 container cannot hold. The tool copies only the first picture stream, so those extra tracks do not stop the copy.

When it has to re-encode

If the picture is in an unusual format, such as an old AVI or a rarely used codec, the tool cannot copy it into a container it can write. It then re-encodes the picture to an MP4 and says so on the page: "The picture had to be re-encoded to MP4 because its format cannot be copied as it is." That takes longer and loses a little quality, because the picture is compressed again. It uses a high-quality setting, but it is still a second compression, so keep your original.

There is also one case the tool cannot handle at all. Some phone .mov files use a codec the processing engine cannot read. The tool's own tip is to export those from the phone first, as a standard video, and then drop in the exported file.

What happens if there is no sound

If a video has no sound track, the tool tells you: "This video has no sound track, so there is nothing to remove." That is a useful check in itself. Some screen recorders save silent files, and some clips that seem to have no sound do in fact carry a silent track. If the message appears you can use the original as it is.

Common reasons to remove the sound

A screen recording with background noise. Record the screen, mute it, and add a voice-over or captions afterwards. Silent screen recordings are also the right choice for support articles and for short product demonstrations in an email, because most people watch them with the sound off.

A clip with music you cannot publish. Music in the background of a recording can lead to a video being muted or removed by the platform you post it on. Removing the sound first avoids the problem. This does not give you the right to use the music, it just removes it from your copy.

A silent loop for a website. Browsers will only autoplay a video if it is muted, and a file without a sound track is the simplest way to guarantee that. A silent track also makes the file slightly smaller.

A privacy clean-up. A clip filmed in a meeting or on a street can capture voices of people who did not agree to be recorded. Removing the sound before sharing a short piece of the video is a considerate default.

Before a picture edit. If you want to reverse a clip, or to rotate it, without carrying sound through the edit, remove the sound first. That keeps the result clean and means the later tools only handle a picture.

What stays the same

The result keeps the same picture, the same resolution, the same frame rate and the same length as the original. The only difference is that the sound track is gone, and the file is usually smaller by the size of the audio. The file name is the original with "-muted" added, so meeting.mp4 gives meeting-muted.mp4. Your original file is never changed. There is also a small preview player on the page before you start, so you can check you picked the right file.

Trial limits

Video tools run in your browser, so the file is not uploaded. The first time you use one, the browser downloads a processing engine of about 25 MB from a public network. After that the engine is cached on your device. On the trial, a file can be up to 50 MB, and a paid plan allows up to 200 MB. If a clip is bigger than your allowance, Trim Video can cut it to the part you need first, and Compress Video can reduce a recording to a size that fits. For a very large file, trimming first is best, because Mute Video does not shrink the picture.

If you want the sound instead

Sometimes the aim is the reverse of muting: keep the sound and lose the picture. Extract Audio saves the sound track of a video as an audio file, and our guide to extracting an audio track from a video to MP3 walks through it. A common pair of jobs is to extract the audio for a transcript and to mute the video for the web version.

Steps

1. Open Mute Video and drop in your video.
2. Check the preview to make sure it is the right file.
3. Press Remove sound and wait for the progress bar. The first time, allow a moment for the engine to load.
4. Read any note under the result. It tells you if the picture had to be re-encoded.
5. Download the muted video. It is named after the original with "-muted" added.
6. If it needs trimming or shrinking, do that afterwards with Trim Video or Compress Video.

The tool is a Professional Tool with 10 trial uses a day, then a $1 day pass or the $4.99 monthly plan.

Common mistakes

Assuming the tool shrinks the file. It only drops the sound track, so a large clip stays large. Muting a clip that already had no sound and wondering why nothing happened. Overwriting the original when saving the new file. Forgetting that the trial allows 50 MB. Dropping in a phone .mov that the engine cannot read and not trying an export first. And sharing a muted clip that still has a visible screen with private information, since muting only handles what can be heard.

Summary

Taking the sound off a video should not cost you any quality. Mute Video copies the picture as it is for MP4, MOV, WebM and MKV files, tells you when it had to re-encode, warns you when there is nothing to remove, and leaves your original alone. More tools for video are in the video tools category.

Open Mute Video→

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