iMovie 4 Tip: Exporting Selected Audio Clips

My colleague Glenn and I discovered an interesting iMovie 4 tip today. He needed to edit a short bit of audio that he had captured on his iPod (using a Belkin voice recorder), so we pulled it into iMovie to take advantage of the new audio track waveforms.

After isolating the section of audio he needed in a separate audio clip, I suggested that he export (sorry, share) it as a QuickTime file by selecting the clip and choosing “Share selected clips only” in the Share dialog. However, it won’t work if you don’t have any video clips in your movie.

We ended up deleting the rest of the audio that wasn’t needed, but here’s a workaround if you’re working with several audio clips in the movie.

1. Add a still photo to the video track and change its duration to match your audio clip.
2. Lock the audio clip to your video (choose Lock Audio Clip at Playhead from the Advanced menu).
3. Select the video clip, and choose Share from the File menu.
4. Mark the “Share selected clips only” checkbox.
5. Export the clip to QuickTime using expert settings.
6. In the Movie Settings dialog, uncheck the Video checkbox, and click the Share button.

You can now open the QuickTime file in QuickTime Player and export it as an audio file (such as MP3, AIFF, etc.).

Published by Jeff Carlson

Author, photographer, and late-nighter Jeff Carlson writes for outlets such as Popular Photography, DPReview, Creative Pro, and others, and is a contributing editor for TidBITS. He is the author of Take Control of Your Digital Photos; The Photographer's Guide to Luminar AI, Take Control of Apple Watch, and Take Control of Your Digital Storage, among many other titles. View all posts by Jeff Carlson