How can you only extract 30 seconds of audio using ffmpeg

Question

I am using ffmpeg for audio conversion. I am using this command:

ffmpeg -i file.mp3 file.wav

This works fine. However I only want to my output file to contain maximum 1 minute of audio. How can I do that using ffmpeg?

Solution 1

Use the following command:

ffmpeg -ss 0 -t 30 -i file.mp3 file.wav

• -ss 0 - Start at 0 seconds
• -t 30 - Capture 30 seconds (from 0, so 0:00 - 0:30). If you want 1 minute of audio, use -t 60.
• file.mp3 - Input file
• file.wav - output file

Solution 2

This command also works perfect. I cropped my music from 0 seconds to 30 seconds. Here test.mp3 is input file and temp.mp3 is output file.

-ss: Indicates the starting point.

-to: Indicates where to stop.

-y : force output file to overwrite.

ffmpeg -i test.mp3 -ss 00:00:00 -to 00:00:30 -c copy -y temp.mp3

Solution 3

Use the -t parameter:

-t duration
Restrict the transcoded/captured video sequence to the duration specified in seconds. "hh:mm:ss[.xxx]" syntax is also supported.

Comments

[Drew Chapin]

-t is actually an output option. The format should be ffmpeg -ss 0 -i file.mp3 -t 30 file.wav

[H.v.M.]

Is there a way to do this without re-encoding? I wrote ffmpeg -ss 0 -i in.m4a -t 240 out.m4a and got 128kbps output from 253kbps input. EDIT: I found it, just add -acodec copy.