Extract Audio from MPEG to ALAC — Free Online Tool
Extract audio from MPEG video files and save it as ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) in an M4A container — converting the lossy MP2 or MP3 audio track into a lossless format ideal for Apple devices and iTunes libraries. ALAC preserves every bit of the source audio with no further generation loss, making it the best archival choice when working with legacy MPEG broadcast or DVD-compatible footage.
to
FFmpeg Command
Copy this command to run the same conversion locally with FFmpeg on your desktop. Download FFmpeg
Drop your MPEG file here
or click to browse
Free — no uploads, no signups. Your files never leave your browser.
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
MPEG files typically carry audio encoded in MP2 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer II), though MP3 and AAC tracks are also possible. During this conversion, FFmpeg discards the video stream entirely using the -vn flag and re-encodes the audio stream using Apple's ALAC codec, wrapping it in an MPEG-4 (.m4a) container. Because MPEG's audio codecs are all lossy, this is a lossy-to-lossless transcode — ALAC will capture and preserve the decoded PCM audio exactly, but it cannot recover information that was discarded by the original MP2 or MP3 encoding. The result is a mathematically lossless copy of what was in the MPEG file, with no additional quality degradation from this conversion step.
What Each Flag Does
| Flag | What it does |
|---|---|
ffmpeg
|
Invokes the FFmpeg program, which handles all audio and video processing. In the browser-based version of this tool, FFmpeg runs locally via WebAssembly (ffmpeg.wasm) — no data leaves your device. |
-i input.mpeg
|
Specifies the input MPEG file. FFmpeg will read this file's container and detect its streams — typically an MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 video stream and an MP2 audio stream — before applying the processing instructions that follow. |
-vn
|
Disables video output entirely, telling FFmpeg to ignore the MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 video stream and produce an audio-only output. Without this flag, FFmpeg would attempt to include video in the output, which is not supported by the M4A container. |
-c:a alac
|
Sets the audio codec to ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec), instructing FFmpeg to decode the source MP2 audio and re-encode it losslessly into ALAC format. This flag appears twice in the generated command, which is redundant but harmless — one instance is sufficient. |
-c:a alac
|
A duplicate of the previous audio codec flag. This redundancy has no effect on the output — FFmpeg processes the ALAC instruction once. If running this command manually, you can safely omit this second instance. |
output.m4a
|
Defines the output filename and extension. The .m4a extension tells FFmpeg to wrap the ALAC-encoded audio in an MPEG-4 container, which is the standard and correct container for ALAC files and is natively recognized by iTunes, Apple Music, and all Apple devices. |
Common Use Cases
- Archiving audio from legacy broadcast MPEG recordings or digitized VHS tapes into a lossless format for long-term preservation in an Apple ecosystem library
- Extracting the MP2 audio track from DVD-compatible MPEG files and storing it losslessly in iTunes or Apple Music for high-fidelity playback on Mac or iPhone
- Pulling interview or dialogue audio from old MPEG news footage for use in podcast production, where the editor wants to avoid any further lossy transcoding steps
- Converting MPEG soundtrack recordings from legacy hardware camcorders or set-top box captures into ALAC for use in Logic Pro or GarageBand projects
- Stripping and preserving the audio layer from MPEG streaming captures before the video is discarded, ensuring the extracted audio can be re-encoded to any target format without a second lossy step
- Preparing MPEG audio content for distribution in Apple's ecosystem — including iTunes Store or Apple Music — which uses ALAC as its lossless delivery format
Frequently Asked Questions
No — ALAC is lossless, but it can only preserve the audio information that already exists in the source file. MP2 encoding in MPEG files is a lossy process that permanently discards some audio data, and ALAC cannot recover it. What ALAC guarantees is that no additional quality loss is introduced during or after this conversion step, making it the best archival format for this source material.
ALAC is a lossless compression format, meaning it retains every sample of the decoded PCM audio, whereas MP2 — the typical audio codec in MPEG files — achieves much smaller sizes through perceptual lossy compression. Even with ALAC's efficient lossless compression, the resulting M4A file will generally be several times larger than the equivalent MP2 stream. This is the expected and correct behavior for a lossless format.
ALAC has been open-sourced by Apple since 2011 and is supported by a wide range of software beyond Apple's ecosystem, including VLC, foobar2000, Plex, and most modern media players. However, some Android devices and non-Apple portable players may not support it natively. If broad device compatibility is a priority over losslessness, FLAC is a more universally supported lossless alternative.
MPEG files have limited metadata support, so there is generally little structured tag data to carry over. The M4A container used by ALAC does support rich metadata tags (title, artist, album, artwork, etc.), but any metadata present in the MPEG source will depend on what was embedded there originally. You may want to use a tool like MusicBrainz Picard or iTunes to add proper tags to the resulting ALAC file after conversion.
You can batch process MPEG files in a shell loop. On Linux or macOS, use: for f in *.mpeg; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -vn -c:a alac "${f%.mpeg}.m4a"; done. On Windows Command Prompt, use: for %f in (*.mpeg) do ffmpeg -i "%f" -vn -c:a alac "%~nf.m4a". This applies the same extraction and ALAC encoding to every MPEG file in the directory, which is especially useful for archiving large collections of legacy footage.
The duplicated '-c:a alac' flag in the generated command is redundant — one instance is sufficient to instruct FFmpeg to encode the audio stream using the ALAC codec. The conversion will work correctly regardless, as FFmpeg simply applies the last or only relevant codec instruction. If you are running this command manually on your desktop, you can safely remove the duplicate and use: ffmpeg -i input.mpeg -vn -c:a alac output.m4a.
Technical Notes
MPEG files most commonly carry MP2 audio (MPEG-1 Audio Layer II) at bitrates typically ranging from 128 kbps to 384 kbps, which is the broadcast standard used in DVD-Video and digital television. Less commonly, MPEG files may contain MP3 or AAC audio depending on the encoder used. In all cases, re-encoding to ALAC involves a full decode-then-encode cycle: the lossy audio is decoded to raw PCM and then compressed losslessly using ALAC. The resulting M4A file uses an MPEG-4 container, which supports chapter markers — a feature MPEG does not — though chapter data will not be automatically generated from the source. ALAC has no bitrate or quality parameters because it is lossless; output quality is entirely determined by the source audio. The output sample rate and bit depth will match what was decoded from the MPEG stream, typically 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz at 16-bit. For very long MPEG recordings (broadcast captures, digitized tapes), be aware that file sizes for ALAC can be substantial — roughly 5–10 MB per minute at CD-quality rates — so plan storage accordingly.