How to extract center channel only from an AC3?

[Mikey1000]

I'll try to explain it the best i can. I recently bought a dvd (metallica videos) and i noticed the audio is 5.1 Ac3. Now what i want to do is strip the center channel only (which are the vocals) and convert it to mp3.
Is that even possible? It's kind of urgent too..so any help would be appreciated :p

[Snowknight26]

Sure you can.
You can do it several ways. Easiest for me (hah!) would be to run it through eac3to (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=125966) from the command line by doing
eac3to file.ac3 output.wav -mono
That should leave output only the center channel if I recall correctly. (If not, run eac3to file.ac3 output.wavs - the file you'd want is output.C.wav)
From there, you can use something like LAME to encode the WAV to MP3.

[setarip_old]

Hi!

GoldWave or virtually any other audio editing program should be able to handle both procedures...

[Snowknight26]

Now that I think about it, Audacity with its recent ffmpeg decoding can do all of it too.

[Mikey1000]

eac3to worked like a charm! Thanks alot Snowknight26