Extracting Audio From A Movie

Q: I have a bunch of movies on my hard drive that contain live performances from some of my favorite bands. Instead of having to watch the videos every time, I’d like to extract the audio from the performances so I can listen to them on my MP3 player. What sort of standalone program can I use to do this?

A: This is one of those things that you’ll probably start doing more frequently once you know how it’s done. When you think about it, most of the movie files that we watch contain spectacular audio. Having to watch the video each time you want to listen to the audio means that you’ll be chained to your PC, unless you have one of those newfangled portable media devices. We live in a portable society – we want to take our data with us.

There are several tools that will do this for you, but I’m going to recommend that you check out Video to Audio Converter. This program can extract audio from AVI, WMV, ASF, MPG, and MPEG files to MP3, WAV, WMA, and OGG formats. I gave it a test run on several of the files that I have on my hard drive, and the results were perfect. The audio was extracted speedily, and the quality was right on. There are a variety of options for the output settings, which means that you actually do have control over what the program spits out. Video to Audio Converter will apparently let you extract audio from 30 files in the unregistered version, but if you like what you see and hear, you can register the program for US$19.95.

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