Extract Audio from 3GP to AIFF — Free Online Tool
Extract audio from a 3GP mobile video file and save it as a high-quality uncompressed AIFF file. This tool decodes the AAC or MP3 audio track from the 3GP container and re-encodes it to PCM 16-bit big-endian — AIFF's native lossless format — making it ideal for use in professional audio workflows on macOS.
to
FFmpeg Command
Copy this command to run the same conversion locally with FFmpeg on your desktop. Download FFmpeg
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Settings
Note: Browser-based encoding uses approximate quality targets. For precise CRF compression, copy the FFmpeg command above and run it on your desktop.
Estimated output:
Conversion Complete!
DownloadHow It Works
3GP files typically contain audio encoded in AAC (or occasionally MP3) at low bitrates, optimized for mobile networks with defaults around 64k. Because AIFF is an uncompressed PCM format, this conversion is not a simple remux — the compressed audio stream must be fully decoded and then re-encoded as raw PCM data using the pcm_s16be codec (signed 16-bit big-endian PCM). The video stream is discarded entirely using the -vn flag. The result is a lossless AIFF file that accurately represents whatever audio quality was present in the original 3GP — though it cannot recover detail lost during the original AAC encoding. File sizes will increase substantially, as uncompressed PCM audio is far larger than AAC at the same duration.
What Each Flag Does
| Flag | What it does |
|---|---|
ffmpeg
|
Invokes the FFmpeg program. When run in the browser, this is executed via FFmpeg.wasm (a WebAssembly build), so no files leave your device. The exact same command works identically in a native FFmpeg installation on macOS, Windows, or Linux. |
-i input.3gp
|
Specifies the input file — a 3GP multimedia container, typically containing an H.264 video stream and an AAC audio stream encoded for mobile network delivery. |
-vn
|
Disables video output entirely, telling FFmpeg to ignore the H.264 (or MJPEG) video stream in the 3GP file. This is required because AIFF is a pure audio format and cannot hold video data. |
-c:a pcm_s16be
|
Sets the audio codec to signed 16-bit big-endian PCM, which is the native uncompressed audio format used by AIFF. This decodes the compressed AAC audio from the 3GP source into raw PCM samples stored in the big-endian byte order that the AIFF specification requires. |
output.aiff
|
Specifies the output filename with the .aiff extension. FFmpeg uses this extension to automatically select the AIFF container format, which wraps the pcm_s16be audio stream in Apple's Audio Interchange File Format structure. |
Common Use Cases
- Extracting a voice memo or recorded call saved as a 3GP file on an older Android phone and importing it into GarageBand or Logic Pro on macOS for editing
- Pulling audio from a 3GP video captured on a Nokia or early smartphone to archive speech recordings in a durable, uncompressed format
- Preparing audio from a 3GP field recording for use in a professional sound design project where downstream tools require uncompressed AIFF input
- Recovering the audio track from a 3GP clip sent via MMS or messaging app and converting it to an editor-friendly format for podcast post-production
- Batch-extracting audio from a collection of legacy 3GP video files to preserve them as lossless AIFF before the originals are discarded
- Delivering audio extracted from a 3GP file to a mastering engineer or broadcast workflow that mandates uncompressed AIFF delivery
Frequently Asked Questions
No — converting to AIFF does not improve audio quality beyond what was captured in the 3GP file. The 3GP container stores audio as AAC (typically at 64kbps), which is a lossy codec. When this tool decodes that AAC stream and writes it as uncompressed PCM in AIFF, the result is a lossless representation of the already-compressed audio. Any artifacts or frequency loss introduced by the original AAC encoding are preserved in the output. What AIFF guarantees is that no further quality degradation occurs during this conversion step.
3GP audio is stored as compressed AAC, which typically achieves compression ratios of 10:1 or more compared to uncompressed audio. AIFF uses raw PCM — every sample is stored as a full 16-bit integer with no compression. A 3GP clip with 64kbps AAC audio might yield an AIFF file 15–20 times larger for the same duration. This is expected and is the nature of uncompressed audio formats, which prioritize editability and compatibility over storage efficiency.
This tool outputs 16-bit big-endian PCM (pcm_s16be), which is the standard default for AIFF files. Since the source 3GP audio is AAC encoded at low mobile bitrates (often 64kbps), 16-bit output is more than sufficient to represent all the detail present in the source. If you need 24-bit or 32-bit AIFF for specific professional workflows, you can modify the FFmpeg command shown on this page by replacing pcm_s16be with pcm_s24be or pcm_s32be.
The video stream is completely discarded. The -vn flag in the FFmpeg command instructs FFmpeg to ignore all video streams and produce an audio-only output file. AIFF is a purely audio container and cannot store video, so this is the correct and expected behavior. Only the first audio track from the 3GP file is extracted, as 3GP does not support multiple audio tracks.
Replace pcm_s16be in the command with pcm_s24be for 24-bit output: ffmpeg -i input.3gp -vn -c:a pcm_s24be output.aiff. You can also use pcm_s32be for 32-bit integer or pcm_f32be for 32-bit floating-point PCM, both of which are valid AIFF codecs. Keep in mind that since the original 3GP audio is AAC-compressed, increasing the bit depth beyond 16-bit primarily increases file size without recovering any additional sonic detail from the source.
Yes — on macOS or Linux you can wrap the command in a shell loop: for f in *.3gp; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -vn -c:a pcm_s16be "${f%.3gp}.aiff"; done. On Windows Command Prompt, use: for %f in (*.3gp) do ffmpeg -i "%f" -vn -c:a pcm_s16be "%~nf.aiff". This is especially useful for converting an archive of legacy 3GP recordings from an old mobile device all at once. The browser-based tool on this page processes one file at a time, so the FFmpeg command is the recommended approach for batch work.
Technical Notes
3GP audio is almost universally AAC encoded, as AAC is the default audio codec in the 3GP specification and is specified in the technical profile for this tool at 64kbps. The conversion pipeline therefore involves a full AAC decode pass followed by PCM encoding — there is no stream-copy shortcut available here since AIFF cannot contain compressed audio streams. The output uses the big-endian byte order (pcm_s16be) required by the AIFF specification, as opposed to the little-endian PCM used by WAV. AIFF files do not carry ID3 tags; instead they use AIFF MARK and NAME chunks for metadata, but FFmpeg will attempt to map any available title or artist metadata from the 3GP container's iTunes-style atoms into AIFF metadata fields. The -vn flag is essential here — without it, FFmpeg would attempt to transcode the 3GP video stream into a format AIFF cannot contain and would error out. One known limitation: if the 3GP file uses AMR-NB audio (an older narrowband codec sometimes found in very early 3GP files from pre-smartphone era devices) rather than AAC, FFmpeg will still decode and convert it correctly, but the audio quality will be notably poor due to the narrowband 8kHz sample rate of AMR-NB, which no amount of upsampling to 16-bit PCM can improve.