Portable media devices have to be one of the greatest inventions since sliced bread. I don’t know how I ever lived without the ability to listen to whatever I want, whenever I want. I’m sure I coped, somehow, but giving up my portable MP3 player now would be akin to moving back to a cave, and hunting wildebeast for lunch. Having the ability to listen to music, books, radio shows, or whatever I’m in the mood for when I’m working, relaxing, or somewhere in between is very liberating.

Getting copies of media these days is pretty easy too, whether you go through the legal channels of paying through various online music services, or travel down the dark path of file sharing (and although it goes without saying, I still have to say it -- we at GW don’t support or condone the latter). There are limitless opportunities to fill up your media player with just about anything you can think of.

One method of obtaining audio that most people don’t often investigate, but one that I have a lot of fun with, is extracting audio from video sources. Sites that host user contributed video like YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo Video, Metacafe, and Dailymotion are a wealth of new content that, with a few keystrokes, are as easy to pop on to your portable media device as any other method. With the audio extraction method, you can add things like TV shows and movies to your audio collection.

Although there are an endless number of methods for extracting various audio formats from various video sources, I’m going to show you one specific method: extracting audio from FLV video into MP3 format.

FLV video, otherwise known as Flash Video, is a proprietary file format created by Adobe (formerly Macromedia) used for presenting video online. Flash video is the preferred method for video transfer on the sites I mentioned previously. Although FLV files can be downloaded, accessing them usually isn’t as easy as downloading, say, MPEG, WMV or AVI video files because they’re often embedded in custom Flash video players. But if you have the proclivity to dabble in the details, you can get at these files, and then get at their audio.

So let’s get down to the nuts and bolts. In order to get the audio extracted from an FLV, we’re going to need three things:

1. Firefox


2. DownloadHelper (a Firefox add-on)


3. Flv Audio Extractor

You can obtain each of these (if you don’t already have them in your utility arsenal) from the links above.

Once you have everything installed, let’s see just how easy it is to get an MP3 from an FLV. We’re going to practice by extracting the audio from a video on YouTube, an unreleased song called "Lester" by Neil Finn.

1. Launch Firefox, and navigate to YouTube - Lester - Neil Finn acoustic solo


2. Somewhere on the page (anywhere, really -- just tab to a link) press SHIFT-F10 to bring up the Firefox context menu.


3. Arrow down to the DownloadHelper menu, and press ENTER to expand it. This context menu, among other things, will list the videos on the page that are available for download.


4. Arrow up to Lester - Neil Finn acoustic solo, and press ENTER. You’ll be prompted with a standard Windows Save As dialog, where you can enter the location and file name of the video that you’re downloading, or just choose the defaults. I’m going to use d:\lester.flv.


5. Once the video file has downloaded successfully, you can either close Firefox, or minimize it out of the way.


6. Open up the Flv Audio Extractor utility.


7. Press ALT-A (or TAB to the Add button and press ENTER), enter the location and name of the video file that you downloaded (in my case, d:\lester.flv), and press ENTER.


8. Press ALT-E (or TAB to the Extract button and press ENTER) to extract the audio. You can choose an alternative output path, but I just chose the default (the same path my video file is in) by pressing ENTER.


9. Give the extractor a second or two, then TAB to the list view to check the status. It took about two seconds to complete on my 1.4Ghz/1 GB RAM machine.


10. Press ALT-F4 to close the extractor, and we’re all done.

On a side note, you can open multiple FLV files in the Flv Audio Extractor utility, and it will extract the audio from them one after the other, which makes for a nice batch processing of several downloaded videos.

Wasn’t that easy? Now I have a lester.mp3 in the same location as my lester.flv, containing just the audio. Like any other MP3, I can copy it to my MP3 player, and have it available whenever I want, wherever I want.

Extracting audio from video files opens up a lot of portable audio possibility when you think about all of the video sites popping up these days. YouTube alone has millions of videos available. Toss in a simple Firefox add-on, and a freeware extraction utility, and you’ve got the makings for a great way to waste several afternoons.

Oh, and one last thing (WARNING: Shameless plug ahead): both the Braille Sense and Voice Sense are great devices for porting around media like extracted audio MP3s, not to mention everything else they can do.