Why one converter instead of a format-specific tool
Different destinations want different audio formats — a podcast platform wants MP3, a professional editing timeline wants uncompressed WAV, an iPhone-centric workflow might expect AAC, and archival storage might call for FLAC. Rather than needing a separate tool for every combination of source video format and target audio format, a general converter handles any input video and lets you pick whichever output format the situation actually calls for.
This flexibility matters because the right audio format genuinely depends on what happens next — listening casually, editing further, archiving losslessly, or uploading to a specific platform with its own format expectations.
Matching the format to what you'll actually do with it
MP3 remains the right default for casual listening and maximum compatibility. WAV is the right choice if you're taking the audio into an editing tool afterward, since it's uncompressed and won't add another generation of lossy compression on top of whatever's already in the source. FLAC is worth choosing specifically for archival purposes where you want a smaller file than WAV but zero quality loss compared to the original.
AAC sits in a useful middle ground — better compression efficiency than MP3 at a given quality, and it's the native format for Apple's ecosystem, so it's a sensible choice if you know the audio is headed specifically for iOS or macOS playback.
The source video's original audio sets your ceiling
Whatever format you extract to, the resulting audio quality can never exceed what was already captured in the source video — extraction reveals and repackages existing audio, it doesn't add fidelity. A video recorded on a phone in a noisy room will produce noisy audio in any output format; choosing a higher-quality format doesn't fix source-level problems.
This is worth keeping in mind especially when choosing a lossless format like WAV or FLAC for genuinely low-quality source audio — the larger file size doesn't buy you anything if the underlying recording was already compressed or degraded before you started.
Batch extraction saves real time on multiple files
If you have several video files that all need the same audio extraction — a folder of recorded lectures, a series of interview clips — processing them one at a time is tedious compared to a tool that handles a batch in one pass with consistent settings applied to every file. Consistency matters here too: using the same output format and quality setting across a batch keeps the resulting audio files uniform, which matters if they'll be played back or edited together later.