MOV to M4A Converter — Free, Online, No Upload

QuickTime recordings from Mac, screen recordings from iPhone, and video exports from iMovie all save as MOV by default. If the recording captured something you want in your music library — a live performance, a podcast interview, an audio book chapter — you need to strip the video and keep just the audio in a format Apple's ecosystem recognizes as audio: M4A.

M4A is structurally the same as MOV and MP4, just restricted to the audio track and recognized by every Apple product as an audio file rather than a video file. Converting MOV to M4A remuxes the AAC audio stream directly — no re-encoding, no quality loss, and the operation completes in seconds regardless of file size. iTunes, Apple Music, GarageBand, Logic Pro, and iOS all accept M4A natively; drag it in and it's ready to sync or play.

The resulting M4A is far smaller than the MOV source because it contains only the audio data. A 30-minute MOV screen recording might be 800 MB; the M4A keeps only the sound, which at a typical 128–256 kbps is about 30–60 MB. For voice memos and podcast drafts captured as MOV video, this is the simplest path to a distributable audio file.

Typical sizes: MOV 150–500 MB (1 minute 1080p); M4A 3–6 MB (3-minute song).

M4A output is encoded at 192 kbps.

Re-encoding one lossy format into another adds a second round of compression.