How to Remove Audio From a Video on Mac

1. Create a new movie in iMovie and drag your video into the timeline.
2. Select the clip, then choose Modify > Detach Audio. The sound appears as a green bar under the video.
3. Select the green audio bar and press Delete. Alternatively, drag its volume line all the way down.
4. Choose File > Share > File and save.

It works, but iMovie re-encodes the whole video on export, so you lose a little quality and wait for the render. Its export size is also set by its own Resolution and Quality menus. If the goal is just a silent copy of an existing file, the next method is quicker and keeps the picture untouched. For iMovie export sizes, see how to export a smaller file from iMovie.

With ffmpeg, the -an flag means “no audio” and -c:v copy copies the video stream as it is. Nothing is decoded or compressed again, so the picture is bit-for-bit what you started with.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -an -c:v copy output-silent.mp4

We ran this on 8 November 2026 on an 8-second 3840 × 2160 clip. It finished in 0.06 seconds, and ffprobe confirmed the output holds one H.264 video stream and no audio stream. Because only a stream is dropped, the time does not depend on resolution and grows only with file size on disk.

If you do not have ffmpeg, install it with Homebrew (brew install ffmpeg). Nothing else on a stock Mac does this in one step.

Only slightly, in most cases. Audio is a small share of a video file. Our test clip carried 128 kbps stereo AAC, which is normal for phone and camera video, and removing it saved about 130 KB out of a 30.7 MB file.

That is a saving of under half a percent, which is what you would expect: 128 kbps over 8 seconds is roughly 128 KB. The video track is where the size lives. To make the file meaningfully smaller, you have to re-encode the picture or lower its resolution. Read how to reduce video file size on a Mac for those options, and compress video on Mac for the main methods side by side.

Audio matters more when the video is already tiny, such as a low-resolution screen recording, or when the soundtrack is lossless. For a typical clip, remove the audio for privacy or because you will add music later, not to save space.

Do not trust a quick playback with the volume down. List the streams in the file instead. This is the check we used on our test output:

ffprobe -v error -show_entries stream=codec_type -of csv=p=0 output-silent.mp4

A silent file prints only the word video. If you also see audio, a sound track is still present. Some files carry more than one audio track, for example a commentary track, and -an removes all of them at once.

One more caution applies to formats. The -c:v copy trick works when the container can hold the video stream as it is. Going from MP4 to MP4, or MOV to MOV, is safe. If you change the container at the same time, for example MKV to MP4, ffmpeg may refuse to copy a stream the new container does not support, and you would need to re-encode. Keep the extension the same when you want the lossless route.

The same check is worth doing on the result of any app. Open the exported file in QuickTime Player and look at the speaker control, or press Command-I to open the Movie Inspector and read the format details. A file with no audio track shows no audio entry there.

Not as a one-step action that we could find. QuickTime Player can trim, split and rearrange clips, and it can export audio only, but we did not find a menu item that saves a copy of the video without its sound track. We did not run the QuickTime interface for this guide, so check the app’s Edit and File menus on your macOS version.

Turning the volume slider to zero while watching does not change the file. The sound is still there when you share it. If you need a silent file to send, use iMovie, ffmpeg or an app that has a remove-audio option.

The common reasons are privacy and tidiness. A clip filmed in public can pick up conversations you never meant to share. A screen recording can capture notification sounds or a meeting in the background. A silent file also drops cleanly into a presentation, a website background or a social post where you will add music anyway.

Some platforms autoplay video muted, so the sound track is dead weight there. If you plan to share a clip widely, strip the sound first and then check the result on a device before you upload. If you are preparing a clip for a specific destination, our guides to Discord and email cover the size limits.

For a single clip, you do not need Smol. iMovie is free, and the ffmpeg one-liner above is faster than opening any app. If all you want is silence, those are the right tools.

Smol earns its $29 (once, one Mac) when removing the audio is one step of a bigger batch. Its video settings include an option to remove audio, alongside H.265 or H.264, quality and resolution. You can drop a whole folder of clips on it, mix videos with photos and PDFs, and get a copy beside each original with nothing uploaded. There is a Finder right-click action for the same job. Note that Smol compresses as it removes audio, so it is not a lossless remux like -c:v copy. See the best video compressor for Mac or buy Smol.