Yep, I found that Nimo's pak, with the ac3 codec, helped initiate audio playback for the movie and yet TMPGENc and Virtualdub do recognize the audio as valid. Virtualdub states:

"The requested audio compression is not compatible with the input format. Check that the sampling rate and channel count of the input match those of the requested format."

And then when I try to save the audio as a wav file it consumes 180 MB just to playback nothing when opened up. TMPENC leaves the audio slot blank. What more do I have to do?