Question inspired by the last one you answered: Do you have any tips for isolating dialog in a source clip from background music? Aside from the obvious method of fiddling around with equalizer settings in an audio editor, I mean? Backing music is a near-constant presence in most hollywood productions, which makes it hard to use the best quotes from the movie/show. Leaving the audio as-is makes a mess as the source's backing clashed with your song of choice.
I do have some advice, at least for Vegas. I’m not sure if this applies in other editing platforms as well. I always rip mkv files. From there, I convert the mkv files into wmv files using my video converter. Sony Vegas will split wmv files into surround sound, isolating each audio stream so long as your project settings are in surround and not stereo. From there, it’s simply a matter of isolating the audio stream and deleting all of the extra streams.
Vegas will not split avi files in my experience, but perhaps there’s a trick I don’t know of.