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Convert MP4 videos to MP3 audio files

I wanted to listen to some recordings of foreign language study courses but they were available only as MP4 videos. And when you play them on your phones or tablets, they will be paused if you navigate away from the screen. It's video. You need to be looking at it for it to play.

But I wanted to listen to them during my commute, which means I need to be walking and not staring at the screen the whole time. I looked for ways to workaround the video-gets-paused limitation but I found that converting it to mp3 is fast, and doesn't cost a penny.

First, to share the script. I keep it here.


  1. Copy as zip, or clone the converter script from the link above.
  2. Go to the folder "mp4-mp3-converter and confirm that you have the file convert.bat inside.
  3. For Windows, download FFMPEG here.
  4. Save the ZIP file and unpack it. Let's assume you unpacked it on the desktop.
  5. You will see a folder with a name that looks like :  ffmpeg-2016xxxx-{some-numbers}-win64-static, the folder name may differ. Inside this folder you will find another folder called "bin". Take note of the full path to this "bin" folder. For simplicity, we will call this the {bin} folder from here on.
  6. Assuming you have 2 folders on the desktop, Videos and Music, copy convert.bat into Videos.
  7. Hold down Shift key and right click on the Videos folder.
  8. Choose "Open Command Window Here". A terminal should launch.
  9. From the terminal, run convert.bat {Path-to-Music-folder}. So if the Music folder is on the desktop then, convert.bat C:\Users\{username}\Desktop\Music

That's it. The converted files will be generated in the Music folder with the same name as the videos, only with the mp3 extension.

Enjoy! and let me know if you run into problems.

In the future I plan to make the steps easier by adding a GUI but let's see...

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