OSX Music Software

November 14, 2004 2:45 PM

Music software for OSX question: A band of which I am quite fond has posted bootlegs for one of their shows on their Web site, as avi videos. I want to be able to listen to the goodness on my iPod, but I can't find any software that will convert the audio from the avi files to mp3s. VersionTracker and download.com yield various shady, non-working shareware or freeware packages.
posted by jed to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Depends what type of avi it is, really. If it's divx, the audio probably is an MP3 and you just need to extract it. Can you tell us the website in question?
posted by ascullion at 2:49 PM on November 14, 2004

Certainly. The bootlegs are from the band Bishop Allen, the files are available on their bulletin board.
posted by jed at 2:56 PM on November 14, 2004

I'm not at home, so don't have access to all the tools \I would have, but they're not divX, so my suggestion won't help. I don't know how to get the audio out of an AVI like this, but these sites might help. Hopefully someone else can be more helpful.
posted by ascullion at 3:06 PM on November 14, 2004

I downloaded one and QuickTime Pro exported the audio as an 8-bit 11Khz wav file, which I could then make an MP3 out of in iTunes. QTPro isn't free but it's cheap and you might already have it. Be warned, the original sound quality is pretty ghastly.
posted by neustile at 3:48 PM on November 14, 2004

And when I say ghastly, I mean ghastly! it's all overloaded and clipping. I can barely make out what's going on, or even barely what kind of music it is except the guitarist might be channeling Ribot but that could be an artifact ;)
posted by neustile at 3:57 PM on November 14, 2004

avi is more or less just a container, the audio and video could be any number of things.

assuming the audio is simply some sort of wav, aiff, mpeg, mp3, etc. (which it most likely is), audacity will let you import the avi directly, and then export only the audio as mp3 (en/transcoding as necessary)

things like ffmpeg will also split audio and video streams, if you like playing with the command line. of course then you'll possibly still have to encode to your preferred format.
posted by dorian at 5:12 PM on November 14, 2004

Thanks for the pointers. I figured it out and am now enjoying some screechy, low quality, perfect mp3s.
posted by jed at 6:03 PM on November 14, 2004