Blender VSE - How can I just render the audio to do some editing to it? I realize that I can use other programs to render out the audio of a video. But I'm trying to keep it all inside Blender for simplicity. 

I've just tried deleting the video strip and rendering the audio strip. But that seems to be confusing Blender. 

It's also taking about 30 seconds to render one second animation time when I do this. 

Thanks for any help
Depending on how the video is encoded, you might be able to import video as a sound strip into the VSE.

Goto  Add -> Sound  and when the file selection screen opens, you will have to turn off file filtering.  (So you can select something more than 'sound' files.)



Then you can select a video file, and it will only import the sound.