How to Take the Sound Off a Video on iPhone (and Why a Before and After Doesn't Need It)

You typed “how to take the sound off a video on iPhone” for one of two reasons. Either you have an actual clip, a genuine video with its own audio track, and you want that track gone before you send it or post it. Or you are building a before and after reveal, ran into a mention of background music somewhere in this app, and assumed there was an audio file to strip out first. The first case has a real native answer. The second case turns out not to need one, because the question of removing sound never actually arises.

If you mean muting an actual video clip

Open the clip in Photos, tap Edit, and look near the top of the editing screen for a speaker icon. Tap it once and the icon shows a line through it: the clip’s own audio track is now muted, for playback in Photos and for anywhere you export or share the file from afterward. It is a non-destructive edit, exactly like a crop or a trim on the same screen. Reopen Edit later and the option is still there to toggle back, and Revert restores the clip, sound included, to its original state.

That is the whole native tool, and it only does one thing: it silences the audio that was recorded into the clip. It does not replace that silence with anything, it does not touch a second clip, and it has nothing to do with building a comparison between an earlier moment and a later one. Muting a video and turning it into a before and after reveal are unrelated jobs that happen to share one search bar.

If what you were picturing was two clips, one from before a job and one from after it, both muted and then cut together into a reveal, this app is not built for that step. There is no video picker anywhere in it, no timeline, no trimming and no transition between clips. What it takes in is two still photographs, and what it hands back is a video, a GIF or a still image built from that pair. Nothing about a source clip’s audio track, muted or not, ever enters that process, because the source clip itself never does.

What most people actually want when they search this

If a before and after job is what brought you here, the likely trigger is one of two things. Either you filmed a walkthrough of the finished job with your own voice or a customer’s on it and want that gone before you post the clip somewhere, in which case the native mute above is exactly the right tool, applied on its own terms to its own footage. Or you noticed this app mentions background music in its export screen and assumed that meant it was pulling audio from a video you fed it, and wanted to know how to strip that out first.

The second assumption does not hold, because there is no audio to strip. The app never accepts a video as an input at any stage, so no source audio track ever comes along for the ride. What you feed it is two still photographs, one before and one after, and what comes back is built entirely from those two images: a comparison mode, a reveal animation and, if you choose it, one of the built-in music tracks laid over the export afterward. There is no original recording underneath any of that to mute, because nothing was ever recorded through this app in the first place.

That distinction matters more than it looks, because it means the audio question resolves itself the moment you understand what the tool actually does. You are not cleaning up a track. You are deciding, once, at export, whether the finished piece carries music at all.

What you need before you start

Two photographs, not a clip with or without sound. One taken before the job, one after it, shot from as close to the same spot, height, distance, lens and light as you can manage. Nothing about audio factors into either photograph, since a still image has no soundtrack to consider in the first place.

If a video is genuinely part of your plan, a walkthrough clip with your own commentary that you intend to post alongside the reveal rather than instead of it, that clip is a separate piece of content, edited and muted or not in Photos or another editor on its own terms. It does not merge with the photograph pair at any point.

The steps, in order

1. Take or pick the before

Bring the before photograph in however suits the job: pick it from your gallery, shoot it fresh, or if the moment already happened and all you have is a clip, pull a single frame from it with the Photos app’s scrub bar and a screenshot. That frame grab is silent by definition, the same as any other photograph, whether or not the clip it came from had its audio muted.

2. Match the after to it

This is the step that decides whether the pair reads as honest or as two unrelated photos with a caption stretched between them. Stand in the same spot, hold the phone at the same height, keep the same distance, use the main 1x lens on both frames rather than switching to the ultrawide, and shoot under the same light. If the two frames are minutes apart, holding that in your head is enough. If they are hours or weeks apart, our free Ghost Camera mode lays the before photograph over the live viewfinder at an opacity you set, so you can line the second shot up before you press the shutter. The full method, including the five numbers worth writing down, is in how to take matching before and after photos .

3. Choose how the two photographs sit on the frame

Four comparison modes, and every one of them is free: Slider, split by a divider you can drag; Side by Side, both photographs at full height; Top / Bottom, stacked, which reads better than Side by Side on a wide subject like a driveway or a room; and Tap to Switch, one photograph at a time, flipped by a tap. Pick by the subject’s shape, not by which one looks nicest in the abstract.

4. Choose the reveal

Three reveal animations exist: Slider Reveal, an eased wipe across the frame and the one available on the free tier; Tap Reveal, a hard cut at the halfway point; and Zoom In, side by side then a slow push into one. One limit worth knowing before you pick: the video export currently follows Slider Reveal’s own layout regardless of which comparison mode you chose in step three, so a Top / Bottom or Tap to Switch pair reaches a correct still image export today, not yet a correct video export. Slider Reveal is the one to pick if you built one of those two modes and specifically want a video.

5. Decide on sound, and export

This is the point where audio actually enters the process, and it is a choice rather than a cleanup. On Pro, you can add one of five built-in background music tracks, synthesised on device rather than licensed from anywhere, and it sits under the whole export the same way it would under any finished reel. The free tier exports with no music option at all, which is a plain silent file rather than a muted one, because there was never a recorded track underneath it to begin with. Video runs 3.0 to 7.0 seconds in half-second steps, defaulting to 4.0, and exports as an MP4 at 9:16, 4:5, 1:1 or Original. The free tier also covers three exports a day, each behind a short rewarded ad, with a watermark, 9:16 and 1:1 only. Everything that actually builds the pair, all four comparison modes, every filter, all 83 stickers, the full label editor, your logo and business name, and Ghost Camera, is free and ungated regardless.

Where it usually goes wrong

The mistake is not really about sound. It is assuming this app works like a video editor with an audio track to manage, when it has never taken a video in at all. That assumption sends people looking for a mute button that does not exist here, because there is nothing recorded to mute. The real decision, once you understand the flow, is much smaller: music on or music off, made once at export, not a track to clean up beforehand.

The second common mistake sits on the native side of this search: confusing a mute with a delete. Muting a clip in Photos silences its track but keeps the clip itself, including its file size, exactly as it was. If the goal was actually shortening a clip down, whether to fit a platform’s length limit or just to cut dead time off the front, that is the trim handles on the same Edit screen, not the speaker icon, and it is covered the same way, with the same honest redirect, in how to trim a video on iPhone and how to cut a video on iPhone .

How to tell it worked

For a genuine muted clip, the check is simple: play it back with the volume up and confirm nothing plays. For a before and after pair, the useful check happens earlier, before you get anywhere near a template or an export screen. The free before and after slider on this site runs entirely in your browser: drop both photographs in and drag the handle. Nothing leaves your device. A pair shot from the same spot, height, distance, lens and light holds together as the handle moves across it, no sound required to judge it, since a still comparison never had any to begin with.

Once the pair holds, the rest is presentation rather than photography. Minimal is a plain white frame from the Clean category that gets out of the way when the change itself is the whole point, and Reels Ready in the Social category is shaped for the vertical platforms most pairs end up on. The full template catalogue covers all of it, and the complete flow from picking the two photographs to exporting the finished file is written out in how to make a before and after video from two photos . If a longer clip you actually want to cut, shorten or crop is what brought you here rather than an audio question, those native tools are covered the same way, with the same honest redirect, in how to cut a video on iPhone , how to shorten a video on iPhone and how do you crop a video on iPhone . You can read what the app does end to end, including the full free-versus-Pro split, on the app page .