Audio stripped of video when uploading to iCloud.

If you don’t have VLC installed here, go get that.

mp4 is a container spec. The contents of the container can vary.

Usual cause is an mp4 containing a different (unsupported) audio compression format, or the expected AAC audio was compressed using settings incompatible with what Apple players expect.

VLC or some other tool can tell you what audio format is embedded in the file. Go check that.

And VLC likely also has a way to (re-)convert these mp4s into a different mp4 with audio that will work here, as well.

ItsWerder Said:

"Audio stripped of video when uploading to iCloud.: [...]The audio button is gray and cannot be activated. The uploaded videos are not faulty since they work perfectly fine in a Windows environment with audio. The audio disappears when it enters an Apple environment (iOS, macOS, iCloud)."

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Getting Videos to Play with Audio on Apple Devices:

• Are these iTunes Store Videos? If so, piracy is getting in the way, and that is why you cannot see the video.

• Are these Home Vides? If so, then please provide the file type. For mp4 and mov filetypes, QuickTime Player may do the trick.

bert_home wrote:

Be sure the video is completely downloaded. Right now the only way I know how to do that is to edit it. Look for progress circle in the lower right hand corner of the screen when you edit it.

That wouldn’t usually case the video to work on both Windows and Mac, and the audio to work on Windows, and the audio on Mac not so much

bert_home wrote:

So you have tried it? Correct?

Differing mp3 encodings based in differing platforms, and mp3 files that need conversions for various reasons? Yes.

Have had all sorts of “fun” with transferring Windows multimedia files around in past years, too.

Truncated and partial file transfers—iCloud or otherwise—don’t show the same as what was reported above, as the video and audio are contemporaneous within the file. Locality. Not in differing parts of the file.

Be sure the video is completely downloaded. Right now the only way I know how to do that is to edit it. Look for progress circle in the lower right hand corner of the screen when you edit it.

So you have tried it? Correct?

I had the the same issue: as soon as the media was viewed on an iOS device the sound disappeared from the media on all devices where the shared media was present in the iCloud shared photo album, even if it was working previously properly.

According to VLC for some reason the audio was in a secondary audio stream and that got stripped somehow.

Solution was:

• Find a version of the media that still plays the sound
• Download it
• With ffmpeg:
  • Split out the audio:

ffmpeg -i input-video.mov -vn -acodec copy output-audio.aac

(extracting audio with ffmpeg)

• • Split out the video:

ffmpeg -i input-video.mov -c copy -an output-noaudio.mp4

(remove audio from video with ffmpeg)

• • Merge the media into a proper format:

ffmpeg -i output-noaudio.mp4 -i output-audio.aac -c:v copy -c:a aac reencoded.mp4

(merge audio and video with ffmpeg)

Uploading the reencoded file into the shared album solved the problem, and after playing the media with an iOS device the sound did not disappear

The last “merge” link from the previous reply, corrected:

https://superuser.com/questions/277642/how-to-merge-audio-and-video-file-in-ffmpeg