Extract audio from video using iMovie on Mac

Want to reuse the audio or sound track from an existing video or movie? If you are using a Mac, there are several ways you can extract audio from movie and video files. Both QuickTime Player and GarageBand can help you export audio from video on Mac. Check out this guide to export sound track from video using QuickTime Player on Mac. Today, we will show you how to achieve it using another stock app on Mac, iMovie.

imovie video editor for mac logo

We will use iMovie version 10.3.4, the latest as of Dec 2022, on a MacBook Pro. If you use a different version of iMovie, you may see slight difference in appearance.

Open the Launchpad on Mac, find and launch iMovie app. Find the movie or video file in Finder, drag and drop it from Finder to the timeline at the lower section of iMovie main interface. Then follow below steps to extract sound track or background music from your movie or video.

How to extract audio in iMovie?

Click to open the File menu, choose Share > File, optionally type in description and tags for the audio to be exported, choose Audio Only in the Format menu, select an audio file format you desire, such as AAC, MP3, AIFF, WAV.

extract audio, music from video movie on Mac with imovie

Click Next button to open a new dialog where you can optionally type in a new name and select a different location to save the audio file from iMovie to your Mac. In this way, you can export the full audio track from the entire movie or video on Mac.

How to extract a portion of audio from iMovie?

Sometimes you may need only part of the sound track from the source video or movie. For example, you may need only to export the background music from a movie. In this case, you can simply use iMovie to split the video before save it as audio only.

Move the playhead(a vertical line) to the start point in the timeline. Then right click on the video thumbnail in the timeline, and select Split Clip from the pop-up menu. Move the playhead to the end point in the video and split it again. After that go to delete the unwanted parts of the video from iMovie. Finally go to export only the audio from iMovie to Mac just like how we extract the entire sound track from the source movie or video above.