How to Rip Audio Files from Videos using VLC Media Player

VLC Media Player is not just a media player, but a complete program. What I want to introduce you in this post is how VLC convert FLV, AVI, and other video files to MP3 format with simple steps. And it is quite useful when creating unique media files for applications when MP3 files need to be created by extracted audio from video files.

Go to Media > Convert/Save. This opens the dialog box in which the file to be converted can be easily selected. Notice that the media can be converted from a hard drive file, network, removable media, or a Capture Device. Select that command, and VLC will happily prepare to rip the audio from the video, such as PVR to MP3.

Click “Add” to select the desired file that needs to be converted, then hit click Convert/Save as the next step. In the pop-up dialog box, choose the Stream Output. It may be necessary to create and name a new file. Well, you’d better do that so it can be easily found later or if multiple files need to be converted. The file will be saved with the filename with a “.ps” extension. Just substitute the “.ps” extension with an “.mp3” extension is OK.

Note that you can enter the name plus the .mp3 file extension so that .ps is not appended automatically. It is recommended to to that. Go to the Settings section of the Convert dialog box to open the Profile drop down menu. Here, the format can be selected. In this case, the desired format is MP3. Select MP3 encoding.

The final step, press Start and allow the data to stream then save. The MP3 file can now be opened and used as seen fit.

Actually, you can also extract audios from YouTube or Vimeo videos by converting YouTube/Vimeo to MP3 by VLC in the same way mentioned above. What you only need to do is to download the videos, and drag them to VLC in the right form. If the downloaded videos’ cannot be opened by VLC, you can try Doremisoft Video Converter (Video Converter for Mac) which can also help you conduct the conversion perfectly.

In addition, the iTunes can also enable users to convert songs in the iTunes library to another format. The converting will generate a copy of the audio in the format you’ve chosen, which gives you the alternative to either keep or delete the original file. When you convert an audio from a compressed to uncompressed one (for example, from MP3 to AIFF) you wouldn't notice any reduction in sound quality. However, while converting from an uncompressed to compressed format (eg. from AIFF to MP3, AIff to AAC), you should note that it will inevitably lose the sound quality.