ffmpeg does the trick very well. See http://www.catonmat.net/blog/how-to-extract-audio-tracks-from-youtube-video… for example (or search for 'ffmpeg audio extract' on your favorite search engine). To extract the audio track as it is encoded (no transform, just pure copy extract) you do: ffmpeg -i your_video.avi -acodec copy audio.something Maybe the .something is relevant (ie. if you say .mp3 and data is not mp3 ffmpeg would complain). I don't know. Maybe yuu also need to set video codec to null or something like that. Just experiment. The advantage as compared to mplayer is that you don't decode the audio to uncompressed pcm data, it's a raw extract. Take care, Cédric.