Easily Remove Audio from Video with iMovie for Mac

A video usually contains the image and the audio. Sometimes, you'll receive videos with audio that you want to delete it, or change to another piece of audio. There are more scenarios that you want to do audio removal from a video clip. For example, removing music to keep videos copyright-free, or removing vocals to hide a person’s identify, etc.

On you Mac, there are probably two applications you can use to remove audio from a video file. They are iMovie and Final Cut Pro X. Since iMovie is free and FCP costs about $300, iMovie is better to do the work here. If you haven't installed iMovie, get it now on Mac App Store. For Windows users, an iMovie for Windows alternative is needed to do sound removal in PC because iMovie doesn't support Windows.

 

imovie audio removal

 

Now follow these steps to remove audio completely from your video file:

1) Run iMovie from your Applications folder on your Mac, then go to the Projects tab in iMovie to create a new project by click on the large Plus button.

2) Click on the Import Media button (Down Arrow). A Finder window will open for you to choose your video file for sound removal.

3) After importing the video, iMovie will load it into its media library. Drag and drop it to the iMovie timeline.

4) The video file is displayed in the iMovie timeline as below.

remove audio from video with imovie

5) Right click on the video clip in the timeline, and choose the Detach Audio option from the show-up menu. You can also use Option+Command+B combination keys.

detach audio from video in imovie

6) Note that once detached, the blue audio clip becomes a detached green audio clip.

7) Right click on the green audio clip, and choose the Delete option from the menu.

8) Now the video clip in the iMovie timeline has no audio.

9) Next, you can export the audioless video file as a new video file. To do so, go to File > Share > File… in the Menu Bar, or directly click on the Up Arrow buttin in the iMovie interface.

10) From the below interface, just click on the blue Next button to go on, as you really don’t need to change anything.

export audioless video in imovie

11) Then input a name for your new video file without audio and choose an export destination folder. Lastly click on the blue Save button.

12) Now, go to the folder you saved the video to, and play it to make sure the audio has been deleted or not. If you want to add a backgroud music, you could do that from the step 2 to import your music and drag it to iMovie timeline.

imovie vocal removal

That's it. Easy enough, right? You don't have to use the professional Final Cut Pro X to do this type of job. The latter might take more steps. iMovie is enough to basic video editing on Mac. That's why iMovie is so popular in the world.

Now you know how to remove sound or vocal from a video file using iMovie for Mac. The steps are similar if you want to delete audio from video with iMovie for iOS.

Keep in mind: There is no way to get back the removed audio once it has been deleted from your video clips. Make sure to backup the video if you want to use the original video file in the future.

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