Typical reasons to convert 3GP to MP3
- You filmed a concert, a choir or a school play on an old phone and want to listen to the sound in the car or on a music player.
- You have voice messages, interviews or a child's first words recorded as video and want to keep only the voice.
- Your old Android phone's voice recorder saved audio-only .3gp files, and nothing on your computer opens them.
MP3 plays on every device, so this is the easiest way to keep those sounds accessible. Audio-only 3GP files from voice recorder apps are accepted too.
Phone audio: what to expect
Most 3GP files store sound with AMR, a codec built for phone calls. AMR records only the frequencies of the human voice, roughly up to 3.4 kHz in the common narrowband version. Music recorded with it sounds thin, like a song heard through a telephone. Later phones used AAC, which sounds much better. The tool shows which codec your file uses.
Neither AMR nor AAC can be stored inside an MP3 file, so the sound is always decoded and encoded again. The page uses its built-in converter engine to read the old phone codecs, entirely inside your browser.
The right bitrate for phone sound
| Source audio | Recommended MP3 |
|---|---|
| AMR (most older phones) | 64 kbps; more adds nothing |
| AAC speech | 64 to 96 kbps |
| AAC music | 128 to 192 kbps |
Choosing 320 kbps for an AMR recording only makes the file five times bigger with no audible difference. If an old car stereo skips VBR files, use CBR.
Make the MP3 easy to find
Phone files have names like VID_0042.3gp. In Trim & tags, give the MP3 a real title, put the event or the person as artist, and choose a cover. A frame from the video works well, for example the stage at the concert. You can also cut away the shaky first seconds and the end where the phone was put into a pocket.
For Apple devices, 3GP to M4A is a good alternative. To keep the full video as well, convert it with 3GP to MP4.