I have quite a simple question - is there any freeware (or shareware if that's not available) which will simply extract the MP3 audio channel from an XviD file that I have? I've downloaded a couple of tools but they both want to transcode it, which is obviously undesirable and time consuming.

Any help appreciated!

Basically, you want a splitter. Most XviD AVI files have the audio in an MP3 format already.

VirtualDub can do this. Load the AVI into VirtualDub, make sure that the audio is set to "Direct Copy" mode or something like that, then go to File->Save Audio as WAV or something similar. It'll output a WAV file. But since you didn't have it process the WAV, it's really an MP3 wrapped into a WAV container. Look for a copy of "WaveMP3" here: http://mitiok.free.fr to remove the RIFF header from the WAV, and you should have an MP3 file.

VirtualDubMod will do this without the RIFF header.

Right, cheers for the help - I'd already just about managed to get Virtualdubmod to work with the file (it was dodgily encoded) but I needed that WaveMP3 app. to strip the header. Or did I (re: the above post)? I used the "strip" function on the .wav and it successfully processed it, so I was done. Thanks again, anyway!

CDex will also remove the RIFF header if you happen to have it around.