In Mountain Lion, how do I rip only the audio from a DVD as losslessly as possible? I have several concert DVDs that I would like to listen to on my iPod. I have an extensive music library, which is mostly ripped from my own CDs in Apple Lossless format, so my best-case scenario is getting lossless audio off of the DVDs and converting it to ALAC.
I realize that the audio tracks on DVDs might already be lossy if they're in AC3 format, but PCM is lossless. If there is PCM audio on the DVD, then I want to rip that from the DVD and convert that to ALAC. If there is AC3 audio on the DVD, then I want to rip that from the DVD and pretend that I'm not annoyed by a lossy resampling in the conversion of AC3 (which I can't listen to on any device that I own) to AAC (or something else).
I know that Handbrake is great for ripping video, but its FAQ says that it doesn't do audio only. AudioHijackPro will record the audio, so that's introducing an unnecessary layer of loss if the audio is PCM, and I'm not sure if resampling an AC3-to-AAC is less lossy than recording an AC3 track into MP3.
I'm willing to deal with a convoluted workflow to achieve my goal.
Best Answer
MPEG Streamclip can do this. It has options to extract the audio track under the File->Demux menu. You may need apples MPEG2 QT components.