Agree, it often happens that you like some kind of video clip or music video, but you don’t want to save it to your computer in this form, preferring to select only an audio track for later listening. The same can be said about replacing sound in the original video material with your own composition. How to remove the soundtrack from the video or replace it with another in these situations? Many users do not understand the intricacies of such operations. Meanwhile, you can advise a few simple ways that are suitable for all occasions and are not difficult to master.
How to extract a soundtrack from a video: the most primitive method
Let's start with the simplest. Surely many people know that any multimedia formats, whether audio or video, can be converted between themselves using special programs called converters. Moreover, such actions can be performed, so to speak, in a cross mode, converting video to audio and vice versa, and not just using the same type of formats (video / video or audio / audio). Thus, the audio track from the video is extracted quite simply.
In any converter, add the source video file to the list, and as the final file, specify the save in one of the preferred audio formats. The disadvantage of this technique is that not all programs of this type allow you to select the desired characteristics of the audio output, and the final file, despite the use of a compressed format, may turn out to be too large.
Note: the most ordinary VLC player looks much prettier in this respect, in which such an option to change the video format to audio is provided initially.
How to separate the audio track from the video in video editing programs?
As it turns out, it’s much easier to use specialized applications that were originally designed for video editing. In them, the sound track is displayed on the same timeline that is used for the storyboard video. How to extract a soundtrack from a video with their help? If you need to replace the sound, just remove the audio stop and insert your material. To extract the sound, you can delete the video and save the file in the desired format using the export function.
In some applications (for example, in VirtualDub), there is also a function for directly saving a sound file (something like Save WAV). The final file can be converted to another format, but in the programs themselves, you can set the desired audio format so that you do not need to take unnecessary additional actions later.
Sound Extraction in Audio Editors
Now a few words about how to extract a soundtrack from a video, using audio editors as an example. Despite the fact that initially such software packages were designed exclusively for audio processing, almost all currently known applications support video editing at least at a primitive level. How to extract audio track from video? Elementary!
For example, in the program Cool Edit Pro, which is the predecessor of one of the most powerful and popular packages of our time, Adobe Audition, simply select the “Extract Audio From Video” item from the file menu, open the desired video in the box. When the soundtrack is displayed in the usual waveform, save the file in the desired format, indicating the desired location.
Online resources
On the Internet, you can find many services that offer all users without exception their services for extracting audio from video. You can try, indicating the desired characteristics of the sound file at the output. However, immediately pay attention to some of the inconveniences associated with the fact that quite serious size restrictions can be set to upload the original video to the resource. In addition, the services themselves are far from always able to support specific input or output formats. Yes, and many of these resources usually require payment for a quality conversion (albeit a modest one, but still).
But in the case of the popular YouTube hosting, you can use such resources. For example, on the Internet you can find many portals that, through a link from YouTube through their own services, allow you to download files to user computers in the audio format. Sound extraction will be performed, as it is now commonly called, "on the fly."
What is better to use?
Finally, based on the foregoing, to extract sound from video of any format and then save it in audio format, you can recommend using either video or audio editors, since the actions in them are very simple, and the resulting file will not be comparable in size to the original one. In addition, the desired quality at the output can be adjusted very finely. Well, converters and online services can be used in cases where there is no necessary software at hand, or the user is simply too lazy to do the settings on his own.