CLAMPANTS

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July 31, 2008

Extracting Audio (mp3s) from FLVs

I'm a podcast junkie. Listening to lectures, radio shows, conferences, talks, interviews, readings, etc makes my commute...palatable...enjoyable, even.

Recently, i've been stymied by the migration of many interesting discussion and conferences from audio (mp3) podcasts to video archives. This is fine and well, and I understand the reasons for this...but I just don't consume videos (i'm not going to watch a video in my car, and i'm not with-it enough to have a decent "viewing internet videos at home" setup)...and most times, the videos in question are either "Person at podium" or "talking head with skype headset," meaning, terribly pointless to watch.

Anyways, I found a fairly decent way to pull mp3 audio files out of download FLVs (Flash video, which is the format many video collections are saved as). The usual caveats apply - this probably isn't that new and there probably are hundreds of other (better?) ways to do this...but here goes:

If you don't have it, download and install the Adobe AIR runtime.
Download and install RichFLV (a free, light, pretty rad Flash video editing tool).
Download the (Flash) video of your choice. You can do this manually (root around in the source or linked media of a page...or, if you're lucky the site you're downloading from actually provides a simple "download" link), but i've been using an app called Orbit Downloader...it is kind of un-slick and makes me feel kind of bad about using it, but it gets the job done somewhat expiditiously if not intuitively (and can pull out all files from a page, not just Flash videos...which is cool but also makes it feel like overkill for my needs).
Open the downloaded Flash video in RichFLV.
Within the Export menu (screenshot), select "Audio (mp3)" and...voila, audio file (maybe of note: the exported mp3 lacks any metadata, so that may need to be added if you're so inclined).

I've been briefly looking at ways to extract audio from other video formats (like mp4)...but haven't had much luck in finding a solution that doesn't feel like "just enough additional work to be annoying."

Clampants | July 31, 2008 09:21 AM

Comments

The thing about most MP4 video files is that the audio track isn't always an MP3. It's often an AAC (not the DRM-protected AAC of the iTunes store, but the open, better-sounding-at-the-same-bitrate-than-MP3 format). Quicktime Player will let you extract audio (or video) tracks from mp4 files. Open the movie in the player, choose Window-->Show Movie Properties.

From the resulting dialog, deselect the tracks you DON'T want (presumably the video track), then click Extract.

The audio track will be copied to a new untitled Quicktime file.

What you do next depends on what format you want the audio to be in, or how much work you want to do.

You can choose File-->Export and select "Sound to AIF [or Sound to WAV]" if you want to convert it to MP3 on your own (in the audio ripper of your choice).

OR: you can download the LAME MP3 encoder Quicktime component (here for the Mac), and just choose File-->Export-->Sound to LAME MP3

rotorglow | July 31, 2008 01:40 PM

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