HOW TO EXTRACT AUDIO FROM A VIDEO FILE

With Machete, you can quickly and easily extract an audio (or video) from a video file and save it as a separate file. Since all editing operations in Machete are lossless (performed without re-encoding), your audio (or video) stream will be extracted and saved without any quality loss.

! Note that all extracting operations in Machete are currently available for AVI, FLV, MKV, WebM, MP4, 3GP, MOV and WMV video files.

To extract the audio stream from a video file, open this file in Machete and select the menu File-> Save audio stream as... to extract the audio stream and save it as a new audio file. If the file contains several audio streams, the currently selected one will be saved (you can select the audio stream for the playback through the menu Play-> Audio Stream).

To extract a video stream, proceed through the menu File-> Save video stream as...

Please note that the video stream will always be saved in the format of the original video file - AVI, FLV, 3GP etc.

When you extract the MP3 or PCM audio stream from a video file, it will be saved as MP3 or WAV audio file correspondingly. When you extract an audio stream from a WMV file, and its format is not MP3 or PCM, it will be saved as a WMA audio file. In all other cases, the audio stream will be saved in the format of the original video file.

See the table below for easy reference on file format of the extracted audio:

Video file Audio stream Extracted audio file
AVI MP3 MP3
PCM WAV
Other cannot be extracted *
MKV MP3 MP3
PCM WAV
Other MKV
WMV (ASF) MP3 MP3
PCM WAV
Other WMA
FLV MP3 MP3
PCM WAV
Other FLV
MP4 (MOV) MP3 MP3
PCM WAV
Other MP4 (MOV)
3GP Any 3GP
WebM Any WebM

Using Machete, you can extract only a portion of an audio (or video) stream from a file. For this, select the required part of the file using the Selection Panel before starting the extraction.

Selection: extracting audio stream from video file

If you need to extract a portion of a video stream, you need to set a beginning of the selection to a key frame. For extracting a portion of an audio stream, there are no such restrictions.


See also:

How to remux video file using Machete