How to remove audio in Premiere Pro

Unlink the audio and delete it

Adobe renamed Premiere Pro to Adobe Premiere with version 26 in January 2026. The editing commands are the same, so these steps work in both older Premiere Pro versions and current Premiere.

1. Select the clip in the timeline. Its video and audio parts are linked, so both are selected.
2. Choose Clip > Unlink, or right-click the clip and choose Unlink.
3. Click an empty spot in the timeline, then click only the audio part of the clip.
4. Press Delete. The video stays in place and the sound is gone from the sequence.

To delete audio without unlinking, hold Alt (Option on Mac) and click the audio part. That selects only the audio half of a linked clip, and you can press Delete.

Deleting the audio from the timeline doesn’t touch the source file on your disk. The clip in your project panel still has sound, so if you drag it into the sequence again, the audio comes with it.

To remove the audio from every clip in a sequence at once, lock the video tracks with the lock icon in their track headers, press Ctrl+A (Command+A on Mac) to select everything, and press Delete. Clips on locked tracks are not affected, so only the audio goes. Unlock the video tracks afterwards.

Add only the video to the timeline

If you are building a silent sequence from many clips, you can stop the audio from being added at all. In the track headers at the left of the timeline, turn off the source patching button for the audio track (A1) before you insert or overwrite clips from the Source Monitor. Only the video is placed. Remember to turn it back on when you want sound again.

Mute a track instead of deleting

Every audio track has an M button in its header. Clicking it mutes the whole track during playback and export, which is handy when you want to try a version without the original sound but keep the option to bring it back. For a single clip, you can also lower its volume to the minimum in the Effect Controls panel or the Essential Sound panel.

Muting leaves an audio track in the exported file, filled with silence. That is fine for most uses, but some upload forms and workflows check whether a file has audio at all, and a silent track still counts. If you need a file with no audio track, use the export option below.

Export without audio

When the timeline should stay as it is, for example because you also need a version with sound, turn audio off at export:

1. Select the sequence and open the export settings with File > Export > Media or the Export tab.
2. Choose the format and preset you need, for example H.264.
3. Clear the checkbox for the audio section (labelled Export Audio in older versions).
4. Export. The file contains only the video.

If you export often without sound, save these settings as a preset from the export settings so you can pick it next time. The same option exists when you queue the export in Adobe Media Encoder.

Premiere renders the video again when it exports, so match the export settings to your source. If you only need the original file without sound and no other edits, a stream copy with ffmpeg is faster and keeps the picture identical.