Ripping Audio from VOB Files

by Curtiss   |   last updated April 11, 2012   |   Software ·

Yesterday I had the pleasure of trying to figure out how to rip the audio soundtrack off of a DVD. To say the least, it was an extremely painful process. The end lesson for me was that there is no easy way to rip the soundtrack from a DVD.

I’m certain that there are tools out there to make this easier, but with the short amount of time I had to complete the project, I wasn’t able to find one.

Bascially, our technology services department was asked at the last minute to record the audio of a presentation so it could be shared. The only method they had to record the audio was to record it directly onto a DVD with a standalone DVD recorder.

It was then my task to figure out how to get that into a suitable format for Web-based audio by the end of the day.

I tried downloading a handful of tools that said they would rip the audio from a DVD. Three of the tools I tried were all shareware, and would only rip the first five minutes from the video. Unfortunately, that was unacceptable for a video that’s over an hour, and included close to 10 minutes of nothing but noise at the beginning.

The other tool I tried was completely free, but also completely useless. It took close to 3 hours to rip the audio from the hour-long video. When I tested the audio file, I found that it was nothing but white noise.

The next thing I tried was to download a version of VirtualDub that was modified to accept VOB files. I ripped the soundtrack from it, and ended up with basically a 3-hour-long silent WAV.

The work day was almost over, and I still had yet to get a presentable audio file out of the video. I was down to my last resort, which was to close all of the programs on my computer, open the video in CyberLink DVD player and open Audacity to record the audio.

I then sat and watched my computer vigilantly to make sure that no extraneous sounds occurred while I was recording the audio. Finally, an hour and a half after I was supposed to get off work, I had a perfectly presentable audio file to post on the intranet.

So, my question for all of you is: Have you ever had to do this? Were you able to find affordable solutions, or did you just end up doing what I did?