Handbrake: Audio only export options

[qubodup]

Handbrake is extremely useful. It would be even more useful if it had presets for audio-only export presets

This is true for example for video editors, who sometimes have problems with video files' audio tracks, which would benefit from being able to extract those.

Recommended preset option formats:
wav
mp3
ogg vorbis

[woodstockathbf]

So, you want to request that a video encoder be turned into an audio extractor?

There are existing tools for that, which are much faster. Audacity can pull audio tracks from MKV and MP4 files, and write them in a variety of formats.

[qubodup]

You mean remove video encoding and replace it with audio extraction features only? No.

You mean adding audio extraction functionality? Yeah.

Audacity is the only tool I know of that can do it. Unfortunately Audacity's policy regarding bundling mp3 codec makes it overly complicated.

Handbrake can hopefully grow in popularity by filling a gap that no open source software so far fills neatly.

[PhilJFry]

Check out mkvtoolnix, eac3to, ffmpeg, etc. They're doing a fine job demuxing and transcoding audio. No need to build a superfluous audio conversion tool into a video transcoder like Handbrake.

[sr55]

Thanks for the suggestion.

I'm afraid this is considered out of scope for the project. As other users have suggested, there are some good tools out there that can do this already which you should try out.

Cheers,

[qubodup]

This suggestion was made based on the hope that the developers would decide that support for audio files without video would be part of the scope, just like video files with or without audio are supported.

Thanks for the suggestions,
mkvtoolnix is unusably confusing.
eac3to can't identify a basic mp4 x264/aac file. It is also not open source as far as I can tell.
If ffmpeg was the answer to this question, then handbrake would not exist :) - of ourse it works but we're in talking about GUI apps.

I just tested fre:ac. It works with a basic mp4 x265/aac file but unfortunately fails for example with mkv with 5.1 audio.

@sr55
I understand. Thanks for handling the suggestion in such a speedy manner!

[dda23]

For those of you looking to extract audio streams with handbrake the functionality is basically there, I think people just didn't expand on why you would use Audacity or other tools to extract your audio track from an MKV (likely assuming you have already transcoded a source with all the audio tracks already done). For me I've been searching for ways to extract just Director's Commentaries from video_ts source to merge into MKV's I already made but forgot to include the tracks originally.

If you set your Format: MKV, Video Encoder to Ultrafast, Fast Decode enabled, Constant Quality 51, either H.264 or H.265, Framerate Same as Source, on Dimensions I set Anamorphic to Custom and drop width and height to 32x32, set Audio to Auto Passthru for the the track(s) you want to extract, and MOST IMPORTANTLY: TURN OFF ALL FILTERS,

Doing that should net you thousands of fps, then just extract the track from the MKV (Or like I did use MKVToolNix to join the selected tracks from my new file and the original) and you have a source copy of your audio track.

You might also want to turn off subtitles to save time on that scan

Great for extracting extra bonus tracks for director's commentaries, etc. Hope this helps save the next person some time :)

[kangarooo]

It would be just one easy option to extract just audio possible and just video off to format mp3 or wav or acc or some raw or whatever options are already in. Already superb tool and for perfection missing only without video.

[pierrep]

I have just needed exactly this functionality. I have a VIDEO_TS folder that needs the audio extracted. So with the current setup it's a 2 step process - @dda23 provides an example of exporting a video, which then needs to be imported into Audacity and the audio extracted there. It's a pity it can't be a single step process - turn off video export, and save audio only.

[smartroad]

Could there just be an option that turns off video decode/encode? So much like Handbrake can pump out a video without audio, it could pump out a "video" with only audio?

[sr55]

Sorry, there are no plans to implement this feature. Recommend you look at ffmpeg or one of the many GUI tools that sit on top of it.