How to extract multiple audio tracks from a video on Windows 10

A video file may contain more than one audio track. The audio tracks may contain the audio in different languages, or a different audio quality. Videos players like VLC and the Movies & TV app on Windows 10 allow you to select which audio track should play with the accompanying video. For single audio tracks, it’s really easy to extract the audio. All you have to do is convert the video to an audio file. Videos with multiple audio tracks are a different, more complicated case.

If you want to extract multiple audio tracks from a video, or just extract a single audio track from a video that has multiple audio tracks, and you don’t want to buy an app for this specific purpose, you’ll have to use Handbrake, and VLC player.

Handbrake is a popular, and free video converter and we’re going to use it to isolate one of the audio tracks in the video. The output will be a video file which will then be converted to an audio file in VLC.

Need to remove audio from a video file? VLC can do that all on its own.

Isolate audio track with video

Download, install, and run Handbrake. On the Source Selection screen, select the video that has multiple audio tracks.

After you select the file, you will see the interface below. Go to the Audio tab and open the first dropdown that you see. It will list all the audio tracks that are in the file. Select the one you want to isolate and then enter an output directory and file name for the file. Click ‘Start Encode’ and wait for Handbrake to convert the file to an MP4 file with just the audio track that you selected.

This can take some time. I converted a file that was less than 30 minutes long and it took almost 20 minutes to complete.

Extract isolated audio from video

The video file that you have will contain only the one audio track that you selected during conversion. Now all you need to do is extract the audio from the video. This is as simple as converting the MP4 file to an MP3 file and there is no shortage of apps that can do this.

We’re going to use VLC player for it though. Open VLC player and go to Media>Convert/Save. In the Open Media window, click Add and then select the video that Handbrake created. Click the dropdown next to the Convert/Save button and select Convert.

On the next screen, under Profile, select MP3. Enter a name and directory for the output file and click Start. The file will be converted within a few minutes. It doesn’t take long to convert and the output MP3 file will be the audio track from the original video.