iOS 14 - How to extract audio track from any video on iPhone

With the tools built into the Photos app on your iPhone, you can easily remove audio from videos. Unfortunately, the native IOS photo and video application cannot extract the soundtrack from the movie itself. Another iOS application will come to your aid here - Shortcut. With it, after installing an additional shortcut, you can extract the audio track from the video file directly. And it's simple and convenient, because from the share sheet.

There are many situations when an audio extractor can be very useful. You can extract a song from the recorded video and save it to your music library or share it with your friends. Or save the audio from a lecture or tutorial downloaded from the web. Unfortunately, the editing module in the Photos application does not have such functionality. In this situation, you have two solutions to choose from. You can use a third-party app to separate audio from video files, or use the Shortcuts app. The Export Audio shortcut by @jakeyounglol available on RoutineHub allows you to quickly extract the audio from any movie file in the Photos app, whether you recorded the video yourself or downloaded it from the Internet. You can save a file as an AIFF or M4A file in the Files app, and then listen to it or share it.

What You Need To Know Before Installing The Shortcut

Make sure you're using iOS 14 or later. You must also have the ability to add untrusted shortcuts to the Shortcuts application enabled. And iCloud Shortcuts app access is enabled.

Before going on to the next part of this text, make sure you understand well what abbreviations are and what the consequences may be of using them. Everything about untrusted shortcuts can be found in the entry How to enable the download of untrusted shortcuts on an iPhone. The author of the text and the AppleMobile.pl editors do not take responsibility for the consequences and potential damage to the iPhone user using untrusted shortcuts. The user does so entirely at his own risk.

Add the Export Audio shortcut to your iPhone

You can find the Export Audio shortcut in the RoutineHub repository. To download it to your phone, scan the code below with your iPhone.

When the Camera app recognizes the code, a notification banner will appear at the top of the screen. Swipe down on the notification. In the Website QR code window, click the Download Shortcut button. The Add Shortcut tab is displayed. Scroll to the bottom and click the Add Untrusted Shortcut button. The shortcut you added will be visible in the My Shortcuts tab of the Shortcuts app.

Optionally, you can change the format of the audio files created with this shortcut. The Export Audio shortcut can save audio in two formats: AIFF and M4A. AIFF is a lossless file format, and it is used by default by the shortcut Export Audio. However, in this case, the file size may become large. If you want to extract the audio from some lecture or tutorial you'd better use M4A, a lossy AAC format with more compression. The sound quality will be inferior to, but more than adequate for the recording of human speech.

To change the file format:

Launch the Shortcuts app. In the My Shortcuts tab, tap the ellipsis (•••) icon on the Separate Audio shortcut tile. Then, in the Media action box, click Show more, and then select M4A or AIFF. Tap OK shown in the upper right corner to save the changes.

How to extract audio using Export Audio shortcut

Open the Photos app, then go to the Videos folder. Find and select the video you want to remove audio from. Then tap the Share button to view the share sheet. Find the Separate Audio shortcut in the list and tap on it. After a while, a pop-up will appear asking where you want to save the audio file. You can save the file to iPhone memory or iCloud drive. The audio file will be named after the video file. If you want, you can touch the file name and rename it according to your needs. When ready, tap Save in the upper right corner to save the file.

How to play an audio file created with the Export Audio shortcut

Open the Files app and navigate to the folder where you saved the file. Touch an audio file to play it like any other audio file. You can close the Files application and continue listening to the audio file in the background.

How to share an audio file created with the Export Audio shortcut

Open the Files app and navigate to the folder where you saved the file. Select a file, then tap the Share button to view the share sheet. You can share a file via AirDrop, instant messaging, or email.

iOS 14 - How to extract audio track from any video on iPhone