YouTube to WAV
Uncompressed audio, for when the file is going into an editor rather than a music app.
By using this site you confirm you have the right to download the file you request.
How it works
- 1
Paste the link
Clips up to 15 minutes. WAV is large, and the cap is why.
- 2
Pick WAV
It sits at the top of the Audio tab, above the MP3 bitrates.
- 3
Save
Around 10 MB per minute. A four-minute track is roughly 40 MB.
The thing nobody tells you about WAV
Converting a YouTube video to WAV does not restore quality. It cannot. YouTube stores audio already compressed — Opus or AAC — and whatever those codecs discarded when the video was uploaded is gone before we ever see it. A WAV made from that source is a perfect, uncompressed copy of an imperfect original.
If you were hoping WAV would make a 128 kbps upload sound like a CD, it will not, and anybody selling you that is selling you a 40 MB file with nothing extra in it. What WAV actually gives you is a file that does not lose anything *from here on*.
When that is worth 10 MB a minute
It is worth it when the file is an ingredient rather than a finished thing. Drop an MP3 into a video editor or a DAW, cut it, apply effects and export, and the result is encoded a second time — a generation loss on top of the first, and the artefacts compound audibly on anything with cymbals or reverb.
Hand the same editor a WAV and the only compression in the chain is the one in the original upload and the one in your final export. Two generations instead of three sounds like a technicality until you compare them on a quiet passage.
For listening, it is not worth it. A 256 kbps MP3 on normal headphones is indistinguishable from the WAV made out of it, because they both came from the same compressed source — and one of them is a twentieth of the size.
Why fifteen minutes
WAV is raw samples with no compression at all: 1411 kbps, about 10 MB a minute, against 2.4 MB a minute for a 320 kbps MP3. An hour-long recording would be over half a gigabyte.
Our conversions are held in memory, not on a disk, so a few long WAV requests at once would crowd out everybody else’s conversion. The cap keeps the queue moving. Longer recordings are nearly always speech or a set — and for those, MP3 at 128 is the right answer anyway.
Frequently asked questions
Is WAV better than MP3 here?
Better for editing, not for listening. Both come from the same compressed source, so WAV sounds identical while being about twenty times larger.
Will WAV recover lost quality?
No. Nothing can. What was discarded when the video was uploaded is not in the file we receive.
Why is there no bitrate to choose?
WAV is uncompressed, so there is no bitrate setting — it is the raw audio at its full sample rate.
Why is WAV missing on this video?
Because it is longer than 15 minutes. Use 320 kbps MP3 instead, which is the closest thing at a usable size.
Can I open a WAV on a phone?
Yes, every platform plays WAV. But a phone is for listening, and for listening you want the MP3.