Extracting audio from WMV files

[davlukabb]

I have never worked with video and have minimal sound editing experience. My company has a number of .wmv video files of interviews and speeches, which our staff needs to transcribe. The audio quality is poor, specifically there is a lot of background noise, hiss etc. I'm hoping to use Audacity to clean up the sound a bit for our transcribers by extracting the audio from these videos and applying the "noise removal" tool. I've installed the FFmpeg codec and I'm attempting to extract the audio from a large .wmv file (approx 816MB). Audacity appears to be in the process of extracting the audio, however, it's been going for over an hour now and the "Remaining time" keeps going UP rather than down...it's now up to 1:55:18! Does anyone know if this is normal, and approximately how long it *should* take to extract the audio from a file that is nearly 1GB in size? Your feedback is greatly appreciated! Also, if anyone reading this sees a "red flag" and notes I'm doing things the wrong way and has a suggestion as to a better approach, let me know...thank you!

[steve]

FFmpeg currently only has partial support for Windows Media files. If the file refuses to import then you will need to find a third party format converter to convert the WMV files into a format that Audacity supports (such as WAV format).