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  1. Please forgive my ignorance I'm sure there's a topic on this how ever there are so many posts in the forum sometimes you can't see the wood for all the trees.

    Any way I'm looking for a program that will separate 5.1 audio channels from a DVD so I can isolate a single channel to make " Sound Bites " .

    Basically I want to isolate a Voice track from a DVD without all the back ground " Noise " such as music so I can make clean sentences for a little project I have in mind.

    Many thanks

    Oh and preferable Shareware, free or even a trial version
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  2. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
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    Are you thinking that the 5.1 channels amount to: ch1-Voice, ch2-Music, ch3-sfx, ch4-Ambience/NOISE...? Because that is NOT how it works (barring extremely unique exceptions).

    No, you have L, C, R, Ls & Rs (and Sub). There may be MOST voice in the C channel (and least in the Ls & Rs), and there may be most Music in L and R by convention, but EVERY channel can have EVERY signal, depending upon the producer, and those proportions are all unique and RARELY is ANY single element in isolation.

    So, you would have to:
    1. Rip the Movie from the DVD
    2. Demux the audio stream from the Movie
    3. Decode the compression type of the audio stream
    4. Load in an audio editor
    5. apply filters that favor the voice segment and hinder the non-voice segments (and there are a number of them that you would have to tweak each of their settings depending on the program)
    6. attempt to isolate the voice and render out a separate track

    On a 1 hour movie segment, this might take upwards of a couple of weeks worth of work just doing the filtering alone, and even then, what you are left with is only a poor-to-fair job of isolation.

    In summary, I don't recommend it. As I have said many times before, one must consider the job of restoration & enhancement as much (or nearly as much) effort as the job of original creation. This includes: money spent, time & manpower involved, knowledge & techniques & equipment employed.

    Are you willing to do that for this project? Wouldn't it be easier to watch/listen & transcribe the program (or find an example of someone already having done so on the internet), then re-record only a voice track?
    I guess it all depends on what you are willing to devote to this, how critical this portion of the project is, and what your level of expectation is...

    Scott
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  3. BeSweet can take a demuxed AC3 track from a DVD and separate it into six mono WAV tracks. Whether or not one of them is voice and voice only is problematic. I believe Audacity can isolate the voice more or less successfully from the best mono track.
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  4. Audacity with the ffmpeg source plugin can import audio directly from most types of AV files. A 5.1 AC3 file will give you six channels. You can do with them what you will.

    But, as was pointed out, the center channel doesn't necessarily include all the dialog and only the dialog. Completely isolating voices from a mix of voice, music and special effects on a single channel generally isn't possible. Even worse would be trying to separate multiple voices from one channel. Maybe you'll be lucky and the quotes you want will be clean on the center channel.
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