20. Getting Your Audio
Moderator: Niotex
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Sourcing your Audio
Basically, for making your music video you are going to have to convert whatever source you have for the music into an uncompressed PCM wav file. Never directly use compressed audio for editing as video editing programs don't like compressed files. You have to convert your audio to uncompressed wav, no matter what ^_^
Also, to be honest, if you can get a CD version of your song please do. Don't use a downloaded mp3 unless it is absolutely necessary as your audio quality will suffer through re-encoding. It's just as bad as using divxes as a video source. Buy CDs, ok?
Already got your wav? See below for some final preparation tips.
This section will go through the various ways of doing this ready for making your music video. As there are lots of different places you can get your audio from, this chapter is separated into sections for each possible source.
All of the guides may potentially contain information that is useful to you but you will more than likely just want to choose whichever source you will be using.
I will try to keep this guide updated with the best current methods of doing each source type so you might want to return to this guide every time you start a new project ^_^
Sources:
a) CDs [very good quality, pretty easy]
b) DVDs [very good quality, fiddly]
c) Internet Audio - Music purchased from Itunes, MP3s, Ogg Vorbis, Windows Media Audio, Real Audio etc. [variable quality, sometimes easy]
d) Taking audio from a video source [variable quality, sometimes easy]
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Using CDs for your audio
This page used to be fairly long and complicated, but I don't roll like that. Ripping audio from a CD is very easy, so I'll make this quick. You need one thing:
Exact Audio Copy
This ISN'T included in the AMVapp, so you should download and install it on your own.
ADWARE WARNING
EAC is probably the best cd audio ripper available, and it's totally free, but it also unfortunately tries to push crap on you. At the time of this writing, here is what the installer looks like:
You see that last checkbox on the bottom, the one that says eBay Icon? Well, uncheck that junk!
Technically, the very first checkbox is the only one that you really need, so you can safely uncheck all those others as well, if you really want to. CDRDAO, FLAC, and AccurateRip might be useful to you though, so it's up to you if you want them installed. I don't install them, though.
Now, once you get Exact Audio Copy installed, ripping your CD is very simple. Just launch the program, and then insert your CD. You should see a list of all tracks on the CD appear on the screen. You can play each track to find the one you want to rip. Once you've found the one you want, then just click on that track to select it, and then press the big button on the left side of the program that says "WAV". Then just tell it which folder to save the file to, and you're done!
There we go, a nice, big, uncompressed WAV of your audio source, ready for editing!
Zarxrax - August 2008
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Using DVDs for audio
It is possible that you might want to extract audio from a DVD - say a song from a musical or the audio track from a movie trailer. What you will need to do is extract the audio and convert it to WAV for editing.
Right, for this you will either need the AMVapp or the following programs.
DVDFab HD Decrypter (or any DVD ripping program)
DGMPGDec
Ripping the Audio from the DVD
If you have no experience with DVD ripping the you should probably go and read the dvd ripping part of the guide here. What you might want to do is rip only the chapter of the dvd that contains the audio that you want. This will save you some unnecessary audio editing later.
Once you have ripped the vob that contains your audio, you need to load it into DGIndex.
Extracting the audio from the VOB file
In the menu, choose the Audio -> Output Method -> Decode AC3 Track to WAV.
Press F5 and you will get a bunch of information, and at the bottom you will see something that looks a little like this:
In the Audio box, it will list all of the audio tracks that were found in the VOB file. If you see more than one, you may need to try each one in order to find the one you want.
What you will need to do next is go back to the Audio menu, and choose Select Track(s). In the box that pops up, you need to type in the ID number for the audio track you want to get. In the image to the left here, you see that it says
80: AC3 2/0 192
The number 80 here is that audio tracks ID number. So in order to get this audio track, I would put 80 in the box.
Once you have the audio stream you need, choose the File menu and Save Project and you will create both a project file (.d2v) and a WAV file.
Once the processing has completed you should have a wav audio file ready to be edited with.
AbsoluteDestiny & Zarxrax - May 2009
It is possible that you might want to extract audio from a DVD - say a song from a musical or the audio track from a movie trailer. What you will need to do is extract the audio and convert it to WAV for editing.
Right, for this you will either need the AMVapp or the following programs.
DVDFab HD Decrypter (or any DVD ripping program)
DGMPGDec
Ripping the Audio from the DVD
If you have no experience with DVD ripping the you should probably go and read the dvd ripping part of the guide here. What you might want to do is rip only the chapter of the dvd that contains the audio that you want. This will save you some unnecessary audio editing later.
Once you have ripped the vob that contains your audio, you need to load it into DGIndex.
Extracting the audio from the VOB file
In the menu, choose the Audio -> Output Method -> Decode AC3 Track to WAV.
Press F5 and you will get a bunch of information, and at the bottom you will see something that looks a little like this:
In the Audio box, it will list all of the audio tracks that were found in the VOB file. If you see more than one, you may need to try each one in order to find the one you want.
What you will need to do next is go back to the Audio menu, and choose Select Track(s). In the box that pops up, you need to type in the ID number for the audio track you want to get. In the image to the left here, you see that it says
80: AC3 2/0 192
The number 80 here is that audio tracks ID number. So in order to get this audio track, I would put 80 in the box.
Once you have the audio stream you need, choose the File menu and Save Project and you will create both a project file (.d2v) and a WAV file.
Once the processing has completed you should have a wav audio file ready to be edited with.
AbsoluteDestiny & Zarxrax - May 2009
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Using Downloaded Audio and Misc. Audio Files
First things first:
DON'T ILLEGALLY DOWNLOAD MUSIC TO USE IN YOUR AMVS!
Next, an almost just as important piece of advice:
YOU ONLY EVER EDIT VIDEOS USING UNCOMPRESSED WAV AUDIO
OK? Got that?
Lots of people try to edit with mp3 audio and things like that. Don't. It will often crash editing software and some (esp vbr) mp3s and so on will not be supported.
The Solution: convert it to uncompressed wav, silly ^_^ They don't take up that much space and are much better for editing than anything else ever.
Second thing - If you can get the song on CD, get it on cd. The quality will be much better, you wont have to lose further quality by recompressing and you'll have a nice shiny cd.
Anyway, back to Internet audio.... most the audio types you will want to convert can be converted with one program. In fact, there are a lot of programs that do this but the one with the some of the best support (in my opinion) is dBpowerAmp Music Converter.
Although it is free, not everyone wants to go through the hassle of getting it so I am actually going to offer 3 few different guides to converting Internet audio:
1) Converting loads of useful things with dBpowerAMP Music Converter
2) Converting lots of things that can be played in Winamp (note: may not work for all formats, option 1 is better if available)
3) Converting anything that you can hear in windows but can't be converted directly (e.g. locked codecs, some game music and so on)
Converting audio with dBpowerAMP Music Converter
I like this program. It's not the best GUI for doing things like creating mp3s (as it's not always customisable enough, IMO) but it is great for quick conversion of lots and lots of different audio types.
The best part is, of course, that it's free.
Go get it!
OK, once it is installed, make sure you have the right codec support by visiting their codec central and downloading whatever you need.
Right, now the rest is a piece of cake:
Go to your audio file, right-click and select "Convert to". If that doesn't work, load the program up from the Start menu... you may find that it is a file you can't convert from. In which case you may need to download the codec.
Then a little box will appear with the various supported types to convert to - you need "wave".
Now, in the conversion section there is a nice helpful CD Quality button. I recommend choosing that if you really don't know what bit and sample rate your file is. However, if you know it is a 48kHz file then by all means change the settings to save as a 48kHz wav. Similarly, make sure you don't reduce the sample rate ^_^;;;
There is also a Normalisation option, which I recommend using to make your audio nice and loud without clipping.
OK, once you've selected your options, click convert >> and it should make your wav file which is what you need for editing.
Converting with Winamp
Winamp can output anything it can play into an uncompressed wav file. This is very useful as it's the most popular audio player and can support an awful lot of audio types.
To save to wav instead of playing the file,
Load up winamp
Press Ctrl + P
Go to Plugins - Output and select the Nullsoft Disk Writer plugin:
Click configure and select a location for your output file.
Load your audio into winamp and "play" it. Instead it will be very quickly written to disc as an uncompressed wav.
However, this does not work for everything winamp can play - but it does work for most things. You'll just have to test it.
N.B. You have to set your output back to what it was before (probably WaveOut) in order to hear your songs in winamp again. Otherwise it will just convert everything instead of playing it.
Converting anything you can hear in windows
Guess what kiddies, we are going to use dBpowerAMP Music Converter again but this time we need to download the Auxiliary Input Plugin.
The principle is simple. You can hear some audio on your pc but it is unsupported by normal audio programs that can make wav files. These may have protected codecs or be some odd streaming media or something. In any case, you can't extract the audio by normal means.
So, you sample it.
The Auxiliary Input Plugin is designed to be used for sampling audio through your line-in on your sound card. However, it has a nifty little feature which allows you to capture the audio from any of the multimedia audio sources such as Wave, MIDI and so on.
Very useful.
OK, load up the plugin - it is actually a separate application, not dBpowerAmp itself.
Click options and select the channel that your sound will be coming through - probably "Wave":
You might want to test and see if the volume levels are ok and if the audio is registering. Click "Test Recording Level" and if you can "see" your audio then you are in business.
Make sure it's not going over that "optimal" line by adjusting the necessary volume controls in Windows.
Now you are ready to go. Click "convert to" and choose wave. The program can automatically convert the file after it's sampled but we want a .wav output so choose wav. Again there is a normalisation option that I recommend using.
Finally, after you click the convert button a little box will pop up with a button. That is your stop/start button. Start it, play your audio and press stop when it's done.
Tada!
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Getting Audio from Video Files
This can either be really easy or slightly tricky depending on what your source file is.Let's go!
1) Getting audio from most video files using VirtualDub
If you have an avi or mpg file, try loading it into VirtualDub.
If it doesn't work, or if you have some other type of video such as an mkv or mp4, then you simply need to first load the file through AviSynth using the DirectShowSource() command, and then open this AVS file in VirtualDub.
Go to 'Audio' and select 'Full Processing Mode'
Go to the File menu and choose Save WAV to save the audio as an uncompressed wav file.
With any luck you should have your audio.
2) Getting audio from locked video codecs such as RealMovie
Basically, with any locked codec you are going to have to do it the hard way and sample the audio directly. See the last part of the Using Downloaded Audio guide for a solution to extracting audio from locked sources.