How do I export only the audio from DaVinci Resolve?

In the Deliver page, set the format to WAV and choose Linear PCM. The render then contains audio only, with no video stream.

Why is my Resolve export one file with eight channels?

The timeline was rendered as a single multichannel file. Split it into mono stems with the poly WAV splitter, or enable one file per track in the render settings.

Which bit depth should I export for a sound mixer?

24 bit PCM at the timeline sample rate. It matches production sound and leaves headroom for further processing.

6 min read

How to export audio tracks from DaVinci Resolve without losing your channel layout

Resolve can hand you one mix, one file per track, or one interleaved poly file. Choosing wrong costs an hour in the next room.

Exporting audio out of DaVinci Resolve looks like a two click job until the sound editor calls back and asks why every stem arrived glued into a single file. The Deliver page offers several very different behaviours behind similar looking checkboxes.

Deliver page, audio tab, the three settings that matter

Codec: choose Linear PCM for anything going to a mixer or an archive. Never deliver dialogue work as AAC.
Sample rate: match your timeline, which for film work is almost always 48 kHz.
Bit depth: 24 bit for handoff. 16 bit only when a client explicitly asks for it.

Mix, tracks and stems are not the same thing

Rendering the timeline gives you the main mix bus, already summed. Enabling Render one track per file gives you one WAV per timeline track, which is what a dialogue editor usually wants. Bus based stems, meaning dialogue, music and effects as separate deliverables, come from routing your tracks to submix buses first and rendering those buses.

If you skip the routing step and just render the timeline, you cannot separate music from dialogue later. That is the single most common delivery mistake on short films.

Audio only exports

Set the format to WAV in the Deliver page and the video stream disappears from the render. There is no separate audio only mode hidden elsewhere. If you already rendered a master with video and only need the sound, extracting the track from the finished MP4 or MOV is faster than re-rendering, and it is lossless as long as the audio inside was PCM.

When Resolve hands you an interleaved file

A multichannel timeline rendered as one WAV produces an interleaved poly file. That is fine for archiving and wrong for editing. Drop it into the poly WAV splitter here, check the channel order, rename each channel and export mono stems as a ZIP. Nothing is uploaded, so unfinished cuts stay on your machine.

Quality control before you send

Open one exported file in the audio inspector and confirm sample rate, bit depth and channel count.
Check that the file length matches the timeline, not one frame short.
Listen to the head and tail of each stem, not just the middle.
Confirm the loudness target with the client before you normalise anything.