How to extract the audo track from an m4a file?

Question

I've got an m4a video file and would like to extract the sound. How can I do that? Running Arch Linux.

Answer 1

One simple way to do it is, if you have mplayer:

mplayer video.m4a -ao pcm

the audio will be in a file called `audiodump.wav'

You can encode that to an mp3 with `lame -V2 audiodump.wav'

Answer 2

Interesting – typically the .m4a (MP4 Audio) extension is not used for files with video tracks...

This will extract the audio track in its original form (-acodec copy) and discard video (-vn):

ffmpeg -i video.m4a -acodec copy -vn audio.m4a