Extract Audio from MOV to ALAC — Free Online Tool
Extract perfectly lossless audio from MOV files and save it as ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) in an M4A container. Ideal for preserving every detail of high-quality audio captured in professional QuickTime workflows without any quality degradation.
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FFmpeg Command
Copy this command to run the same conversion locally with FFmpeg on your desktop. Download FFmpeg
Drop your MOV file here
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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
This tool strips the video stream from your MOV file entirely and re-encodes the audio track using the ALAC codec, producing a lossless M4A file. MOV files most commonly carry AAC audio (lossy), so this process is a transcoding step — not a simple remux — where the AAC audio is decoded to raw PCM and then re-encoded into ALAC's lossless compression scheme. The result is bit-perfect audio stored in an MPEG-4 container with full Apple ecosystem compatibility. If your MOV source already contains uncompressed PCM audio (common in professional editing workflows), ALAC compression will reduce file size with zero quality loss whatsoever. No video data is written to the output file.
What Each Flag Does
| Flag | What it does |
|---|---|
ffmpeg
|
Invokes the FFmpeg tool. When running this locally, FFmpeg must be installed and available in your system PATH. In the browser, this runs via FFmpeg.wasm compiled to WebAssembly. |
-i input.mov
|
Specifies the input file — in this case a QuickTime MOV container, which may contain video, one or more audio tracks, chapters, and metadata. FFmpeg reads all available streams from this file. |
-vn
|
Disables all video stream output, ensuring the resulting M4A file contains only audio. This is essential because M4A with ALAC is a pure audio format and including video would produce an invalid or unplayable output file. |
-c:a alac
|
Sets the audio codec to ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec). FFmpeg decodes the source audio (typically AAC from the MOV) to PCM and re-encodes it using lossless ALAC compression, preserving the original sample rate and bit depth. |
-c:a alac
|
This flag appears twice in the resolved command. The second instance is redundant but harmless — FFmpeg applies the last specified value for each parameter, so ALAC is still correctly used as the audio codec for the output. |
output.m4a
|
Defines the output filename with the .m4a extension, which signals FFmpeg to use the MPEG-4 audio container — the standard and expected container for ALAC files, and the format recognized natively by iTunes, Apple Music, and iOS/macOS. |
Common Use Cases
- Archive the audio from a professional Final Cut Pro or DaVinci Resolve MOV export in lossless ALAC format before distributing a compressed version
- Extract a lossless music recording session delivered as a MOV file from a videographer and import it into iTunes or Apple Music for library storage
- Preserve the original audio from a high-quality QuickTime screen recording of a musical performance without the lossy artifacts of MP3 or AAC
- Pull lossless audio from a MOV-wrapped master recording to use as a reference track during audio post-production mixing
- Convert MOV audio to ALAC so it can be synced to an iPhone or iPad via Apple Music without any generation loss from re-encoding
- Strip and archive the audio commentary track from a MOV video file as a lossless ALAC file for long-term preservation
Frequently Asked Questions
No — if your MOV file contains AAC audio (the most common default), the conversion to ALAC is not fully lossless end-to-end. AAC is a lossy format, so the audio has already been compressed with some quality loss. What ALAC guarantees is that no additional quality is lost during this specific conversion step: it losslessly captures the decoded PCM output of the AAC stream. If your MOV contains uncompressed PCM or another lossless source, the ALAC output will be a true lossless representation.
The ALAC M4A output will almost always be significantly smaller than the original MOV file because the video stream is completely removed. Compared to the audio-only portion, ALAC typically compresses lossless PCM audio by roughly 40–60%, and if your MOV source was AAC, the ALAC file will be somewhat larger than that AAC track alone since ALAC is lossless and AAC achieves higher compression at the cost of quality.
ALAC has been open-sourced by Apple since 2011, so support is now fairly broad. VLC, foobar2000, ffmpeg-based players, and many Android music apps can play ALAC M4A files natively. However, it is not universally supported the way MP3 or FLAC is — some older hardware players and non-Apple streaming services may not recognize it. For maximum device compatibility with lossless audio, FLAC is often a safer choice, while ALAC is the optimal format within the Apple ecosystem.
MOV supports chapter markers, and ALAC M4A also supports chapters, so this conversion has the potential to preserve chapter data. However, FFmpeg's handling of MOV chapter-to-M4A chapter mapping can be inconsistent depending on how the chapters were embedded in the source file. It is worth verifying chapter preservation in your output using a tool like MediaInfo or iTunes after conversion.
The -vn flag tells FFmpeg to exclude (disable) all video streams from the output. Without it, FFmpeg would attempt to include the video track in the M4A output, which would either fail (since M4A/ALAC has no defined video codec) or produce an unplayable file. Keeping -vn ensures you get a clean, audio-only M4A file as intended.
Yes. On Linux or macOS you can run a simple shell loop: for f in *.mov; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -vn -c:a alac "${f%.mov}.m4a"; done. On Windows Command Prompt, use: for %f in (*.mov) do ffmpeg -i "%f" -vn -c:a alac "%~nf.m4a". This applies the same extraction logic to every MOV file in the directory, which is especially useful for large archives that exceed the 1GB browser limit of the online tool.
Technical Notes
ALAC stores audio in an MPEG-4 container (M4A), which is the same container that AAC audio uses — the difference is solely in the codec. FFmpeg's ALAC encoder does not expose bitrate or quality parameters because ALAC is lossless: the compression ratio is determined solely by the complexity of the audio signal. Sample rate and bit depth from the source are preserved exactly, so a 24-bit/96kHz audio track in the MOV will produce a 24-bit/96kHz ALAC file. Metadata tags such as artist, title, and album embedded in the MOV file may be carried over to the M4A output, though MOV metadata atoms do not always map cleanly to MPEG-4 iTunes-style tags — manual tag verification is recommended for archival use. MOV files used in professional editing contexts (Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro) often carry multiple audio tracks; note that this FFmpeg command will only extract the first audio stream by default. To extract a specific or additional audio track, you would add a stream selector such as -map 0:a:1 to target the second audio stream.