Ever wanted to extract the audio of a concert or favourite YouTube clip? Imagine if you could listen to rare audio of your favourite artist or band on your iPod or Mp3 player. FLV Audio Extractor allows you to do exactly that by ripping audio tracks in Mp3 format from any FLV file. FLV is the flash format that is most frequently used on the Internet to deliver streaming such as YouTube and other video sites.

The program works via a batch processor which can remove audio tracks with ease from several videos at once. You'll firstly need to download the YouTube FLV files with a program such as YouTube Downloader and then you simply load the files into the interface and click "Extract". In theory you should get a perfectly sounding soundtrack although the reality is that sometimes, the audio sound is jumpy or a bit unclear. It seems to depend on what format the clip was uploaded in in the first place but generally the results are satisfactory.

Some time ago a good friend of mine sent me an awesome video in WMV format, featuring one of my favorite bands in concert. I enjoy watching the gig from time to time, but as I mainly listen to music while working on the PC, my music player is minimized most of the time. Therefore, having a video in permanent playback was simply a waste of system resources, not to mention a bit of a distraction.

I started looking for a way to extract the audio of this concert so that I could still enjoy it, but without the video part. After some deceptive apps that seemed perfect at first sight but were then full of limitations, I came across Aoa Audio Extractor: a free, simple tool that, according to the developer's description, enabled you to "extract audio/sound or background music from video files".

After installing the program in a few seconds, I loaded the WMV video on its interface, selected the appropriate configuration settings and started the conversion process. I minimized the program, thinking that the audio track in a two-hour video would take forever to be extracted, but the program only needed a few minutes to seamlessly rip the video's soundtrack and save it to an MP3 file. Now I can enjoy this great concert while writing this, and without having to play the video anymore.

I used Aoa Audio Extractor to convert the audio track in a WMV file to MP3, but there are other possible combinations. The program works also with videos in AVI, MPEG, MPG, FLV, MOV, MP4 and 3GP formats, and can save their soundtracks to WAV and AC3, besides MP3.