AV1 to AAC Converter

Convert AV1 to AAC: Read This First

A bare .av1 file is a raw AV1 video bitstream — by design it carries picture only, with no audio track inside it. So if your goal is to pull a soundtrack out of an .av1 and save it as AAC, there is usually nothing to pull: the output would be silent or empty. AAC itself is an excellent target — it is the near-universal MPEG audio format used by iPhones, YouTube, and most streaming apps — but the audio you want almost never lives in a true .av1 stream. This page is honest about that, shows how the converter behaves, and points you to the files that actually carry the sound.

Why a Raw AV1 File Has No Sound

AV1 (AOMedia Video 1) is defined by the Alliance for Open Media, whose bitstream specification was finalized on March 28, 2018 (validated v1.0.0 in June 2018). That specification describes a video codec — it is open and royalty-free, and it says nothing about audio. A file saved with a plain .av1 extension is normally a raw elementary stream: a sequence of AV1 Open Bitstream Units (OBUs), sometimes wrapped in a minimal IVF header, and nothing else. An elementary stream carries only one kind of data, so there is no container around it to hold a parallel audio track — and therefore no sound to decode.

The AV1 video you watched with sound almost certainly lived inside a container — an .mp4, .mkv, or .webm — that wrapped the AV1 video next to a separate audio track (most often Opus or AAC). When a file is exported or demuxed down to a bare .av1, that audio is left behind. If you ran this conversion and got a silent AAC, that is not a bug in the converter — it is the raw AV1 stream doing exactly what the format specifies.

How to Convert AV1 to AAC

1. Upload Your AV1 File: Drag and drop your .av1 onto the page, or click "+ Add Files" to choose it from your computer. You can queue several files to process with the same settings.
2. Pick a Quality Preset: Open "Show All Options" and choose a Quality Preset (Highest down to lower presets) for a one-click AAC bitrate, or switch to Custom Bitrate and pick Constant Bitrate for predictable size or Variable Bitrate for better quality at the same average. Specific file size lets you target an exact size in MB.
3. Set Audio Channel, Sample Rate, or Trim (Optional): Audio Channel and Audio Sample Rate both default to Original, which copies the decoded audio untouched; switch Channel to Mono to roughly halve a voice file, or use Trim to export only part of the timeline.
4. Convert and Download: Click "Convert" and download your AAC. No sign-up, no watermark.

Walk-through: Will Your AV1 File Actually Have Sound?

Whether you get audio depends entirely on what you actually uploaded, because the AV1 specification defines only video — any audio rides in the container alongside it. The common cases:

• A true raw .av1 elementary stream (OBUs or IVF): This is video only. An AAC made from it will be empty or silent — there is nothing inside to extract, and no setting can create a soundtrack that was never in the file.
• A container that was misnamed .av1: Occasionally an .mp4, .mkv, or .webm gets renamed with an .av1 extension. If your file is secretly a container with a real audio track, the converter will decode that track and re-encode it to AAC normally. But that is the exception, not the rule.
• You actually want the soundtrack of an AV1 video: then you are starting from the wrong file. Upload the full container — the .mp4, .mkv, or .webm that holds both the AV1 video and the audio — to the matching tool below.

If you are not sure whether your file is a bare stream or a container, check the extension: .av1, .obu, and .ivf are video-only AV1 streams, while .mp4, .mkv, and .webm can carry both video and audio together.

Where Your Audio Probably Is

AV1 is almost always delivered inside a container, so that container is where your soundtrack lives. Because both AV1 and Opus are royalty-free, web and streaming files frequently pair AV1 video with an Opus track in WebM or MP4; broadcast-style and Apple-ecosystem sources lean toward AAC. Either way, point the right tool at the whole file:

• An MP4 container: use MP4 to AAC to decode the audio track from an MP4 (which often carries AV1 or H.264 video) into an AAC file.
• A Matroska (.mkv) container: use MKV to AAC — MKV frequently pairs AV1 video with Opus, AC-3, or AAC audio.
• A WebM container: use WebM to AAC for the AV1 + Opus files most common on the open web.

When This Doesn't Work

If your AV1 file is a true elementary stream with no companion audio, no tool can manufacture sound that was never encoded — the fix is to find the original container or the separate audio file, not to change the output format. And if you only want the video in a playable package rather than its audio, you are on the wrong tool entirely: transcode it with AV1 to MP4 to wrap the raw stream into a file that ordinary players and devices can open. Once you have a container that genuinely contains a track, extracting clean AAC is straightforward.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is my AV1 to AAC output silent or empty?

Because a raw .av1 file is an AV1 video elementary stream and holds no audio. AV1 is defined by the Alliance for Open Media as a video-only codec, so there is no soundtrack inside a bare .av1 to decode, and any AAC produced from it will be silent. The audio for that footage lived in the container — an .mp4, .mkv, or .webm — that the video was demuxed from. Convert that container to AAC instead.

Is there such a thing as "AV1 audio"?

No. AV1 (AOMedia Video 1) encodes picture, not sound — the specification finalized in March 2018 defines a video bitstream and nothing about audio. When a file is described as "AV1," the audio riding alongside it is a separate stream encoded with a different codec, most commonly Opus or AAC, carried in an MP4, WebM, or Matroska container. Pull that existing audio out by converting the container, not the bare stream.

What audio codec is usually paired with AV1 video?

Most often Opus, and frequently AAC. Because AV1 and Opus are both royalty-free, streaming and web sources commonly bundle them together in WebM and MP4 files, while Apple-ecosystem and broadcast-style files tend to use AAC. The AV1 stream itself carries none of this — the audio is always a separate track in the container. This tool reads whatever audio stream a real container holds and re-encodes it to AAC.

Will converting a video's audio to AAC lose quality?

Some, yes — but usually not in a way you will hear. The source audio inside an AV1 container (Opus or AAC) is already lossy, so re-encoding to AAC is a second lossy pass and sheds a little detail. Choosing a Quality Preset around 192 kbps or higher keeps the result transparent for casual listening. You cannot recover quality the original never had, so there is no benefit to encoding above the source bitrate. A true raw .av1 stream, of course, has no audio to convert at all.

Why pick AAC instead of MP3?

AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) was standardized as MPEG-2 Part 7 (ISO/IEC 13818-7) in 1997 and extended in MPEG-4 Part 3 (ISO/IEC 14496-3) as the intended successor to MP3, and it generally sounds better than MP3 at the same bitrate. It is also the default audio format on iOS, YouTube, Android (2.3+), and PlayStation, so an AAC file plays natively almost everywhere. If you specifically need the broadest legacy compatibility instead, AV1 to MP3 is the alternative — though it carries the same raw-stream caveat.

Should the AAC be .aac or .m4a?

This tool outputs a raw .aac (ADTS) stream, which players and editors read directly. AAC audio is also very commonly delivered as .m4a, which is the same AAC data wrapped in an MP4 container so it can carry title, artist, and album-art tags. If you need rich metadata, add it in a tag editor afterward — that step is independent of the conversion. In our testing, on a true raw .av1 elementary stream the converter has no audio track to work with, so regardless of bitrate the output is silent; a real .mp4 or .webm container with an Opus track produces a normal AAC file at the selected quality.

How are my files handled, and are they kept private?

Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically a few hours after conversion — never shared or made public. There is no sign-up and no watermark.