There are different ways to pull audio from your videos. You can convert a video to an audio format, or you can capture audio using screen-recording software. So, let’s take a look at the 13 best free MP3 grabbers you could use.

Using a program on your desktop, you can save your screen activities, including system sounds and microphone, directly to your PC. Desktop MP3 grabbers typically offer the best quality and functionality. These programs require an audio grabber download, and some might slow down older computers or those less equipped to handle high-demand programs.

OS: Windows, macOS

Price: free trial / HK$199 per year

Best for: pulling clean audio from microphone and multiple system sources

G2 rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars from 44 reviews

Movavi Screen Recorder can capture both your system audio and your microphone input at the same time. Movavi’s sound grabber can create rich content with simultaneous screen recording and webcam input as well. Save recordings to popular video formats like MP3 for fast and easy sharing to Google and YouTube.

Features:

• Record your mouse movements and keystrokes to get the most out of screen recording
• Draw on videos to highlight important moments
• Record videos with or without the internal audio stream and microphone sound

Pros:

• Supports HD and 4K quality
• All popular video and audio formats, including MP3, are available
• A sleek and simple interface boosts efficiency

Cons:

• For the best results, you’ll have to use the full version

OS: Windows, macOS, Linux

Price: free

Best for: sound processing and editing

G2 rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars with 331 reviews

This is free and open-source audio editing software, it is feature-rich and more than capable of audio ripping. Audacity is available for PC, Mac, and Linux and has all the features you need to cut together your podcast.

Features:

• Completely free

• Supports a lot of professional plugins

Pros:

• Powerful audio tools and effects such as noise removal

Cons:

• Outdated interface, that is a bit confusing for beginners

Get Audacity

OS: Windows

Price: free

Best for: pulling music and other audio from CDs, vinyl, and cassette tape

CNET rating: 3.9 out of 5 stars with 214 reviews

Audiograbber normalizes music, deletes silence from the beginning and ending of tracks, and can encode audio in most popular formats, including MP3 and WAV. This free desktop software can also download and upload disk info from GnuDb, a free database of CD audio, so you can share your tracks and enjoy others.

Features:

• Includes basic editing tools

• Compatible with GnuDb

Pros:

• Very simple, a good option for beginners

Cons:

• Users must install a third-party search engine

Download Audiograbber

OS: Windows

Price: free

Best for: pulling clean audio from microphone and multiple system sources

CNET rating: 4.2 out of 5 stars with 146 reviews

One of the most notable features of Foobar2000 is its completely customizable user interface. The SDK gives total control over the configuration. At its core, Foobar2000 supports most audio file formats, including MP3, and can transcode supported audio formats. It can also read inside compressed files and rip CDs. Foobar2000 is compatible with Windows, iOS, and Android.

Features:

• Completely customizable user interface

Pros:

• Supports a lot of audio formats

Cons:

• Requires more computer knowledge than other MP3-editing programs

Download Foobar2000

OS: Windows

Price: free

Best for: reading and controlling audio distortions caused by damaged CDs

CNET rating: 3.6 out of 5 stars with 30 reviews

Exact Audio Copy (EAC) reads CDs “almost perfectly.” It provides time positions for any errors that can’t be corrected, enabling the user to control any potential distortion caused by the error. This is perfect for ripping scratched CDs without listening to every extracted track to identify and locate distortions.

Features:

• User control over potential distortion

• Double-pass error detection

Pros:

• Available completely free of charge

Cons:

• Not currently compatible with Mac or Linux

Download Exact Audio Copy

OS: Windows

Price: free

Best for: converting to standard audio file formats with names and titles

Microsoft Windows users can download a free software package known as CDex to rip CDs with CD-Text support that allows easy inclusion of album, artist, and track titles. CDex can also automatically identify most CDs and retrieve metadata from supported online databases. Tracks can be directly recorded or ripped with normalization and advanced jitter correction and indication.

Features:

• Includes CD-Text and metadata

• Has normalization and correction tools

Pros:

• Good for saving digital audio

Cons:

• Unreliable when used with a drive that caches audio

Download CDex

OS: Linux

Price: free

Best for: encoding on Linux

Asunder is an open-source program. Save your tracks in various popular formats, using CDDB to name each track and add tags. Asunder also lets you create M3U playlists. Simultaneous ripping and encoding speed up the process. No specific desktop environment is required.

Features:

• Has access to CDDB

• Enables the creation of MP3 playlists

Pros:

• Good for encoding on Linux

Cons:

• Does not support MusicBrainz for tagging

Download Asunder

OS: Windows

Price: free

Best for: burning CDs with high-quality album art and metadata

CNET rating: 4 out of 5 stars with 1215 reviews

EZ CD Audio Converter creates high-quality CDs, MP3s, and other audio files. Users can batch convert an unlimited number of audio files at once in over 60 formats with double-pass error detection, digital silence removal, fade, de-emphasis, normalization, and advanced metadata editing.

Features:

• Double-pass error detection

• Silence removal, normalization, and other tools

Pros:

• Supports batch file conversion

Cons:

• Paid service after the free 30-day trial

Download EZ CD Audio Converter

OS: macOS

Price: free

Best for: Mac users

Max is a desktop app for Mac that allows users to create high-quality music files in multiple popular audio formats. The program supports over 20 compressed and uncompressed formats for input and output.

Features:

• iTunes compatibility for easy addition to the library
• Error correction

Pros:

• Supports multiple audio formats

Cons:

• Cannot convert WMA or Real Audio files

Download Max

OS: Windows, macOS, Ubuntu

Price: free

Best for: extracting audio from video files

Trustpilot rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars with 296 reviews

This desktop software program extracts the audio from video files on your computer and saves them as MP3, M4A, or OGG files that you can then play within the application or another music player. Queue video files by dragging and dropping one at a time or in large groups. Conversion is fast, and the resulting music files have a bitrate of up to 320Kbps.

Features:

• Playback within the application

• Drag-and-drop interface

Pros:

• Extracts audio from a video with high speed and quality

Cons:

• Users have complained of functionality issues after recent updates

Download 4K Video to MP3

If you don't want to download an MP3 grabber on your PC, you can execute the entire process online at your convenience. The flip side is that they need a steady internet connection and tend to slow down computers, especially older models without sufficient system resources.

OS: any, works online

Price: free / $4.99

Best for: compressing and converting videos to desired size and quality

This online HD video converter boasts a speed of up to 900 frames per second for conversion to compressed video formats and audio formats like MP3. There’s no limit to the file size you can convert on HDconvert, but the free option does not include higher-quality videos with no watermark.

Features:

• Converts video files at up to 900 frames per second

• Compresses and converts video

Pros:

• No file size limitations

Cons:

• The free version does not include high-quality video

Go to HDconvert

OS: any, works online

Price: free

Best for: recording audio from your sound card or microphone

Apowersoft Free Online Audio Recorder is a free online service, but it does require the download and installation of a launcher the first time you use it. After that, you can start the recorder with one click. Set the recorder to pick up your in-game audio, voice chats, and more. Your audio files can be MP3, WMA, AAC, or any of several other formats.

Features:

• Records system and microphone audio

Pros:

• Can be used to record a variety of system audio sources

Cons:

• Requires download and install of a launcher

Go to Apowersoft Free Online Audio Recorder

Extensions are one of the most convenient ways to grab audio from tabs on your Chrome browser. However, Chrome extensions cannot capture audio from offline videos or files and cannot record sound on Mac devices.

OS: any with Google Chrome

Price: free

Best for: recording video with audio

Rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars with over 10K reviews and 5M users

Loom is a screen-grabbing tool with high versatility of usage. It can record screen activity, webcam, microphone and share the result with your team. It can also grab system sound. However, the tool isn’t specialized in sound capturing, so you may have to process the result to get the audio you need.

Features:

• Records screen with system and microphone audio

Pros:

• Allows for high versatility of usage

Cons:

• Cannot grab audio without the video

Get Loom