Make an Audio CD from DV Tape

David writes, “Is there a way to take my DV tape and put only the audio onto a cd? So that people can listen to the audio from the program in their car? I do the multimedia for my church and we are just begining to get into this.”
It’s definitely possible to take the audio from your digital video tape and put it on a CD. The process will vary slightly depending on what video editing software you use, but the basics of getting the job done are the same in every application. I’ll walk through the process of using Windows Movie Maker to capture and edit the video here.
After capturing the video with Windows Movie Maker, add the video to the editing Timeline on the Audio/Music track. Keep in mind that the maximum length for Audio CDs is 72 minutes, so if your audio is longer, you may want to split the video into two files.

From the menu, choose File > Save Movie File. Select My Computer from the list of options presented in the Save Movie Wizard.

Name the file and choose a location to save the file.

Select High Quality Audio (160 Kbps) from the list of Other Settings.

After Windows Movie Maker finishes exporting the audio, open the audio file in your favorite CD burning application and burn an Audio CD.

Additional Notes on Capturing Audio from a DV tape

If you want to save yourself some time in processing the audio, you could record the audio directly from the digital video camera’s headphone line out with a computer or external audio recorder. This would give you immediate access to the audio file, without needing to wait for the computer to capture everything on the DV tape. Then simply open the file in an audio editor (like Audacity), edit the audio, save the file and burn it as an audio CD.