After all these years it’s finally happened and you don’t have a clue what to do. You have a movie with some amazing audio and you want to extract it, but because you’ve never done it before it’s hard to know where to start. You might be surprised to know it’s actually very easy and anyone with a Mac could probably do it with their eyes closed. Once you’ve done it once you’ll be able to do it over and over again.
You might have come across an app called GarageBand. We’re going to be focusing on this app today because it will help you rip the audio from your movie. Take a good look at the instructions and try it for yourself. If you mess up you don’t need to worry because you can always start again. We’ll just look at the basics here but as time goes on you can always dig into the software a little deeper until you become an expert sound engineer.
Getting started with GarageBand
First you will need to launch the app and once it’s opened up click on New Project. Once you’re presented with a number of different options you can click on the Movie project. Now name your project while remembering to choose something memorable so you can find it again easily. You will have to pick your movie up and drag it into the Movie Track inside the project. If you’ve done everything right so far the soundtrack should appear underneath the Movie Sound track.
Extracting the audio to iTunes
Now pay close attention to the next few steps you must take. Start by clicking Track then clicking on Hide Movie Track. After that you can click on Share then click on Export Track to iTunes. The audio from your chosen movie will now make its way into your iTunes and it will have the same name you choose earlier for your project. Remember that you can increase the quality of the audio track by unchecking the Compress option which means the file will end up in AIFF format.
Editing your audio track
By now you should be an expert at extracting audio from a movie, but there is a chance you won’t always want the entire soundtrack. You are very lucky because GarageBand makes it easy for people to go in and remove all the audio they don’t need. It’s simply a case of cutting parts out and it is another job that won’t take very long to do. It means you will have complete control over everything and you will only need to keep the good stuff while disregarding the crap.
After you’ve finished
Once you have what you want you can do almost anything with your tracks. You can create a new playlist in iTunes and drag them in so they’re all together. Download them onto your iPod or iPhone so you can listen to them no matter where you are. Burn them onto a disk if you want to keep a backup of them. Just remember the hardest part is getting started, but after that you’ll know exactly what to do.
