How to extract audio track from flash video FLV files in Mac OS X

As you may know, YouTube has a huge collection of music videos. Sometimes we watch these videos over and over again just to listen to the song. But it is possible to download a Youtube video and extract audio track from it losslessly, so you won't lose quality. Most video sharing web-sites including Youtube offer FLV and MP4 flash videos. Many higher quality videos on Youtube use MP4 container. Contained within a flash video .FLV and .MP4 files are video and audio tracks. Here I will explain hot to extract the audio track.

iExtractMP3 allows to extract audio track from any FLV file. The program does it losslessly, meaning there is no quality loss (unlike FLV to MP3 conversion). iExtractMP3 allows to extract MP3 and AAC audio tracks from video files. It takes several seconds to extract music from Youtube videos (FLV to MP3 conversion takes much longer).

To download Youtube videos you can use your favorite method. For example, you can use freeware Fast Video Download, a Firefox video downloading add-on. Or you can just copy Youtube videos from the cache of Safari or any other web-browser.

How to extract audio tracks from FLV files with iExtractMP3:

1. launch iExtractMP3
2. drag-n-drop FLV files onto the iExtractMP3
3. select a destination
4. click the "Extract"

iExtractMP3 is work on Mac OS X 10.4 and higher.

If you prefer to use command line utilities, you can extract MP3 and AAC tracks from youtube videos using freeware ffmpeg.