How To Extract Audio From FLV Files [Mac Only]
I’m not an advocate of piracy but here’s a cool idea to grab songs off YouTube. As you may know, YouTube has a huge collection of music videos. Sometimes, I’d watch a music video over and over again just to listen to the song. I’ve just found a nifty application which will extract the audio from FLV files (YouTube videos).
Most sites serve their videos as FLV (Flash Video) files. I’ll just be using YouTube as an example. Video files from YouTube are generally in 2 formats: FLV and MP4. Normal quality videos are formatted in FLV and high quality videos are formatted in MP4.
Contained within a flash video are the video and audio tracks. Using iExtractMP3, the audio track can be split from any FLV file. The perk of using this particular application is: no transcoding is performed when extracting the audio – meaning that there is no loss in quality.
That’s right, iExtractMP3 only grabs the audio, whatever the format (AAC or MP3) from the video file. And it does it amazingly fast too. It managed to extract the audio of a 3 minute long video in only 4 seconds.
And you don’t need to be a brainiac to use it, either. Simply download videos from YouTube, we’ve covered several methods here at MakeUseOf:
- Downloading Difficult Multimedia Files Using The Safari Browser
- 4 Quick Ways To Download YouTube Videos Off The Net
- 6 New Youtube Tools You Should Try
- Get Any Youtube Video to Your iPhone/iPod Touch in 2 Clicks [Mac]
And drop the FLV file into iExtractMP3, select a destination and click ‘Extract’.
If you fancy an online method of exactly the same procedure, Karl has the low-down.
iExtractMP3 is Universal Binary and will work on Mac OS X 10.4 and onwards. Here is the original website in Japanese.
Oh and for those of you who prefer web apps, you may try VidToMP3, an online video to MP3 converter.
Do you know of any other Mac (or Windows) application which can extract audio from FLV files? Share them in the comments!
(By) Jackson Chung is MakeUseOf's Assistant Editor and Mac Correspondent
ffmpeg -i [input flv] -acodec copy [output mp3/aac]
Zachary, I understand this command must be used on Terminal but I don’t how to use it. Would you mid to explain it?
Add the word kick to your youtube URL link !
kickyoutube…
and extract whatever you want from the video !
thanks, this is the best method i’ve found
I know this mac video converter can also extract audio from flv video to mp3 or aac on Mac, it works pretty well for me.
http://macvideoconverter.mac-dvd.com
Actually there is another hack not requiring any additional software except Quicktime Pro. Open the FLV file with Q Pro and from the Window menu click on Show Movie Properties. You can then extract the audio track and Export as a sound file.
Nice Article. It was very helpful for me. I can increase my knowledge about website design and development blog.
Users of Firefox on all platforms can use the “Media Converter” extension for this task. It works with most video sites, just click on the icon and it opens a wizard with step by step instruction to save a copy of the video in any format you want, or to extract the audio only in a variety of formats.
Useful info, if you wanna download video from YouTube for mac, i know Get Tube is the only tool for this job…
if for windows, i althrough use this cool YouTube video converter to extrct audio from FLV video,easily and quickly.
Guide: “How to convert youtube video to mp3…“
I use MPEG Streamclip http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html and just select Export Audio under File menu. Exports as AIFF on some vlf files that iExtractmp3 couldn’t manage.
I use the uSeesoft Audio Converter for Mac
it can also extract audio from video files including MPG, MPEG, MPEG2, MP4, M4V, RM, RMVB, WMV, ASF, MKV, MPV, AVI, 3GP, 3G2, FLV, MPV, MOD, TOD and convert one video format to any other audio format, such as converting MP4 to MP3, converting FLV to WAV, converting MKV to AAC, etc.
http://www.useesoft.com/video-converters/audio-converter-mac.html
Well, i enjoy this MAC Video Converter, which can extract audio from all the video files including FLV, AVI, MOV, etc fast and easily!