How To Take a Music Track Out of a YouTube Video

I recently explored how to take a music track out of a YouTube video that already had a monologue track in the video. The music was interfering with the speech and the monologue was hard to hear. I was surprised how quick and easy it was to take out that track and the video still sounded great. Here’s the tools I used:

• Firefox  extension called YouTube Video and Audio Downloader
• Audacity
• Avidemux

What’s great is that these tools are cross platform and free. So here’s the steps I took to take out the one track and add just the monologue back with the video.

1. Add the Firefox extension to you browser (no need to restart)
2. Go to YouTube, find the video you want to use and edit (or you can use the extension to go to YouTube)
3. Click on the YouTube extension icon (top right next to search bar)
4. In the Quick Download quadrant, click on the 3 white lines for more features. Choose your formats and Quality (I chose HD1080p and MP4)
5. Click on Quick Download, your video will download into the folder where you save any downloads in Firefox
6. It will ask you if you want to run the FFMPEG software used by the extension, you do, so click Run. You will see the process in another window.
7. Now you will have the video file with the audio still in the video and the mp3 with just the audio from the video.
8. Open Audacity and import the mp3. You will now see two tracks, one with music, the other with the monologue.
9. Click on the name of the track in Audacity and choose Split stereo track. The tracks will be separated. Click the X next to the name of the music audio track. Save the mp3.
10. Open Avidemux. Open the video file that the Firefox extension downloaded from YouTube (you can open it by searching for it or by just dragging it into the program)
11. Select  Audio –> Choose Track
12. In Track One, in the drop down menu choose Select Audio Track–> and choose the mp3 you saved from Audacity
13. Click OK. You can now preview your edits by using the control below the video screen.
14. To save as an MP4, under Output Format choose MP4 Muxer. Go to File and Save. Give it a name and choose where to save it.

I hope this helps! :-)

*Note, depending on what platform you use, a video created on a Windows machine may not properly play on a Mac machine. To be safe, you can take an extra step and use another conversion tool like iSkySoft or AnyVideo Converter and add the mp3 audio file to the video again to make sure the audio track properly embeds itself with the video.