Extracting Audio from iMovie

[Dennis R. Cohen]

On 2/13/03 at 8:12 AM, Steve Robertson <stever at mindspring.com>
transmitted the following electronic message:

>Y'all have probably discussed this before, but I couldn't find an 
>answer in the archives.
>
>Recently, I shot about 45 minutes of video, but it turned out that the 
>audio was much more important than the accompanying talking head video. 
>So I wanted to extract the audio from the iMovie clips and continue 
>working with the audio only.
>
>I would eventually like to burn some audio CDs containing this 45 
>minutes of audio. With the software I have, it seems like the best path 
>would be to convert the audio from each clip to an MP3, move the MP3s 
>into the iTunes library, and then use iTunes to burn the audio CDs.
>
>I found the instructions for "extracting audio" from an iMovie clip. 
>but this creates a "document" that is not recognized by any other audio 
>programs available to me. Do I need to export all the iMovie clips as a 
>Quicktime movie, then use some other software (besides iMovie) to work 
>with the audio? Is this something that's covered by Quicktime Pro?
>
>This problem finally convinced me to pay the thirty bucks for Quicktime 
>pro, so I may find my answer there. Just thought it wouldn't hurt to 
>promote more discussion about the relationship between audio processing 
>and iMovie.
>

If you have QuickTime Pro, what you want to do is easy (iMovie 3 steps,
below):

1) Extract the audio tracks as you already have

2) Choose Export from the File menu

3) Choose To QuickTime from the Export: popup menu

4) Choose Expert Settings from the Export dialog's Formats popup

5) Click the Export button to get a Save dialog

6) From the Save dialog's Export popup, choose Sound to AIFF

7) Click Save

Take the AIFF files into iTunes. You don't want to convert to MP3 as
that will result in some quality loss and writing a CD is just going to
convert back to (essentially) AIFF again, but the quality loss is still
there.

<shamelessplug>By the way, this is covered in Chapter 16.
</shamelessplug>

--Dennis Cohen
  iLife Bible (April/May 2003)
  iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, & iDVD Bible
  MacOS X Bible