You might need to convert a rarely used file type to a more popular format, which could make it easier to share with others, save it to a mobile device, or make it compatible with your media player.įor instance, converting those YouTube clips from MP4 to MP3 reduced their sizes by about half (600MB vs. VLC is completely free, can play most media file types, is available on macOS and Linux in addition to Windows, and recently made our list of essential apps to install on a new PC. The main issue with most of these applications being that the trial editions could only convert files a few minutes long or a few megabytes in size – useless for our purpose of converting lengthy audio clips from YouTube.Īfter trying many applications, we learned that VLC Media Player is capable of converting audio and video files, too, which is great news considering we already had the software installed and we bet most of you do, too. We recently tested many of the Windows-based media converters listed at the top of search results for queries such as “MP4 to MP3 converter,” only to discover that virtually all of them have limited licenses without paying for the full program.
