Convert 3GP to MP3 - extract audio
Old smartphone recordings sit in 3GP files with AAC or AMR audio inside. Wave discards the video and re-encodes the audio to a portable 192 kbps MP3 that plays on any device.
What actually changes
3GP was the multimedia container early smartphones (Nokia, Motorola, early Android) recorded to. Video-carrying 3GP files hold AAC or AMR audio alongside H.263 or H.264 video. AMR (both narrow-band and wide-band) was designed for voice - cellular-grade audio that's clear for speech but bandwidth-limited for music. Wave decodes both AMR variants locally through its wasm ffmpeg core.
Because the video track is discarded, extract runs several times faster than a full 3GP-to-MP4 conversion. Wave uses LAME (libmp3lame) at VBR around 190 kbps - well above the transparency threshold for voice, which is what most 3GP audio actually is.
Three steps.
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01
Step 1
Drop your 3GP file onto the card.
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Step 2
Pick MP3 as the output format.
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Step 3
Convert and save the MP3.
Answers, specifically.
The audio sounds tinny - can Wave fix it?
No. AMR narrow-band caps audio bandwidth around 4 kHz - designed for cellular voice calls, not music. The MP3 will sound as clear as the AMR did, no better and no worse. Preserving the audio at its native quality is the honest choice.
What if my 3GP is a voice memo (audio-only)?
Wave rejects audio-only sources - it's a video-to-audio extractor, not an audio-to-audio converter. A dedicated audio tool is the right fit for a voice-memo .3gp.
What about 3G2 files?
3G2 (the CDMA variant used on older Verizon and Sprint phones) uses the same container structure with slightly different codec constraints. Wave treats .3g2 identically to .3gp.
Does the MP3 include the recording date?
Basic ID3 tags (title) are written from the filename. 3GP creation-date metadata doesn't map neatly to MP3, so it's dropped.
How fast is it?
Extracts complete in well under a minute for typical 3GP file lengths - most 3GP clips are short by design because the phones that recorded them were memory-constrained.