mp4 to mp3 coversion application?

[belltree]

Can anyone suggest an application for converting mp4 (video) to mp3? I found that VLC can do it but the quality is very poor. Does anyone have experience in this area that can provide advice? Thank you.

 

[ScottishDuck]

Do not do lossy-to-lossy transcodes. Ever.

 

[AdrianK]

You can use FFMPEG to extract the audio from the file without losing quality:

ffmpeg -i your_video.mp4 -acodec copy -vn audio.mp3

You can grab a pre-compiled FFMPEG binary here.

That will just dump the audio with a .mp3 extension, you can use MediaInfo to find out what codec the audio actually is.

 

[qawes]

You can use Switch.

 

[ChrisA]

Can anyone suggest an application for converting mp4 (video) to mp3? I found that VLC can do it but the quality is very poor. Does anyone have experience in this area that can provide advice? Thank you.

The quality will be poor no matter what you use. The only question is "How poor". iTunes will do the conversion. Set the default conversion to when ripping CDs to MP3. Then go back an highlight the MP4 files you want to convert. Right click and one options to convert to MP3.

XLD is good at this too and as you found VLC can do it too. But don't expect good results transcoding between different compressed format. The end result will literally be the worst of each.

 

[cyberpunk]

Import the video into garageband
Delete video track
Export to disk
Convert to apple lossless using XLD to reduce size

The video is converted when imported to garageband and exported as aiff-c which is a compressed format and so i think there may be some quality loss but this is the best way I know

 

[simsaladimbamba]

import the video into garageband and then delete the video and export the audio as aiff and convert to apple lossless with XLD to reduce size

no conversion, just separate the files

Actually, that is a conversion (or "transcode"), since the audio stored in an .mp4 file is compressed (using AAC or something similar) and by exporting the audio from GarageBand you transcode the audio to an uncompressed format.
You can do the same with MPEG Streamclip and open the .mp4 file in there, go to File > Export Audio and select AIFF as option.

 

[cyberpunk]

my answer was crap

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Took some messing around but yes the same can be achieved in MPEG Streamclip which you can also use to demux(split) from a .vob file

A .vob file uses MPEG-2 as video codec and some Dolby Digital variant as audio codec, which is still compressed. Regarding your sig, what does that have to do with .mp4s?

 

[Babyboi]

You would love this, because I do.

http://www.xilisoft.com/audio-converter-pro.html

 

[simsaladimbamba]

You would love this, because I do.

http://www.xilisoft.com/audio-converter-pro.html

While it is aimed at click-this-button-consumers, it has a terrible interface, it still says "video" when it clearly is an audio transcoding application and it has an installer, though it would suffice to drag and drop the application. It also costs money. But then again, software like this, often seen in spam posts, is still sold, especially poorly translated Windows software.

I prefer MPEG Streamclip + Max, even if it means two steps.

 

[ChrisA]

Can anyone suggest an application for converting mp4 (video) to mp3? I found that VLC can do it but the quality is very poor. Does anyone have experience in this area that can provide advice? Thank you.

VLC is as good as it is going to get. COnverting from a lossy to a lossy format is not going to give good quality. But if you must then make sure the output MP3 bit rate is set much higher then the input MP4. For example if you have a 256K AAC encoded files, make the MP3 version of it a 320K files.


As for which software to use. iTunes will do the conversion for you. I like XLD best.