Ripping Music

[Conterez]

This questions has probably already been asked about 50 thousand times before, but is it possible to rip the music from a video and make an MP3 file out of it?

[gangstaj8]

...music from a video...

You mean taking audio from a DVD? Yeah, and there's more than one way to skin a cat. What I do is basically this... (partly according to EADFAG)

Once you've ripped your DVD and loaded it into DVD2AVI, select the portion you want for your audio. Be liberal in how much you select, cause you can't actually hear anything through DVD2AVI, and you'll be able to edit it later. You may want to play with some of the Audio Menu settings too.

Now, simply go to the file menu and click Save AVI. It'll ask you to choose a compressor for video, choose something fast and lossy, you won't be needing the video anyway. You'll just want the WAV file that's created. If it's the wrong langauge, or channel, just pick a different Audio Track and save again.

Open the WAV file in Audacity (or whatever audio editor you use), crop the bits you don't want, then export it as an MP3.

Simple enough I think, there are many ways to go about it though, so good luck.

[Conterez]

OK, that makes sense. I can use that.

What I was actually looking for though was ripping music from an already made AMV. Such as taking the audio from an AVI or WMV file and using it to make a vid of my own or put it on my MP3 player. Is there a way to do that or is that just illegal and I should just forget about it?

[gangstaj8]

Well, AMV's themselves are a little *cough* shaky concerning legality issues. And I wouldn't use the audio for other videos you're making, for basically the same reason you shouldn't use downloaded footage. I guess the details are a little different, but it all boils down to the same issue. So in other words, yeah, forget it.

Although, I don't see any reason why you couldn't make an MP3 just for listening purposes. Check out VDub.

[Willen]

Well, first off, VDub(/Mod) allows you to do it.

But because of this, AMVs are a way of illegally distributing music. The 3 groups whose music shall not be available on the .ORG made an issue of this.

Now, there are technical reasons for not using downloaded music that are using some form of lossy compression, similar to why you shouldn't use downloaded video. Lower quality, problems with importing into certain editing programs (unless you convert to WAV, which still doesn't fix the first problem), and the possibility that the music was edited/or has additional sounds mixed in (like dialog or sound effects).

So legally we have to say, "Buy the CD." If you only want a single song and quality is not that big of an issue, you are better off either buying from a legitimate online music store (iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, etc.) and burning it to an audio CD to remove the copy-protection encryption. Then rip it back onto your computer as a WAV. There are some stores who have machines that allow you to create and buy custom CDs although I'm sure the list of available songs is somewhat limited for such services. I believe a Sam Goody near me has such a system available.

In the end, we have to treat it like how we treat using downloaded video footage -- don't encourage it. Audio from movie trailers and commercials seem to have different standards since downloaded sources are sometines the only way to get it from...

[Conterez]

Ok guys, thanks a lot for the input. I looked around VDub and could only find audio or not audio for the video copying, but anyway, thanks a lot for the info and advice. I shall hitherto refrain from performing this action. Thanks