Looped Network

Just a few moments ago I needed to extract the audio component out of a video file into some type of standalone audio file, like .mp3. Since I've been working with Audacity to record audio, I figured maybe it had some capability for ripping it out of video.

My initial searches gave me results like this which quickly made it clear that while this is technically possible, it requires some add-ins that I didn't really want to mess around with. However, since the add-in mentioned in that video was for FFmpeg, I realized I could just use that directly.

I didn't have ffmpeg installed, but that was easy enough to rectify on Fedora 36.

sudo dnf install ffmpeg-free

Then I needed to extract the audio. I first checked how it was encoded in the video with:

ffprobe my_video.mp4

After sifting through the output, I saw that it was encoded as aac:

Stream #0:10x2: Audio: aac (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 317 kb/s (default)

Rather than that, I wanted to simultaneously re-encode the audio as MP3. Another quick search showed me some great resources. Ultimately, I ended up doing:

ffmpeg -i my_video.mp4 -q:a 0 -map a bourbon.mp3

As mentioned in the Stack Overflow post, the -q:a 0 parameter allows for a variable bitrate while while -map a says to ignore everything else except the audio.

Just a few moments later, and my MP3 was successfully encoded.