I Extracted the Audio From 20 Video Files in 2.2 Seconds — Here's the Batch Pipeline

Description and use

Extracted 20 videos in 2.2 s (≈9 files/s), achieving 99 % size reduction from 240.8 MB to 2.4 MB.

Problem

Need to quickly extract audio from many video recordings for transcription or listening, while discarding large video files.

Outcome

Extracted 20 videos in 2.2 s (≈9 files/s), achieving 99 % size reduction from 240.8 MB to 2.4 MB.

Workflow

• Iterate over *.mp4 files in a folder
• Run ffmpeg with -vn to drop video stream
• Encode audio to MP3 with libmp3lame -q:a 4 (or copy if AAC)
• Move original MP4 to done folder