Trying to make my own fan edit! any tips on video conversion software? Audio extraction?

After seeing the Star Wars Despecialized Editions I was super excited to create my own fan edit using mostly the DE version. But I ran into problems converting the MKV files into a compatible file (for adobe Premiere).
I can successfully convert the .MKV to a .m4v but the audio gets lost when played imported into premiere (the .m4v file works fine when played in VLC player- audio works fine).

I know that the Star Wars DE .MKV files have all the different audio tracks (differing mixes, subtitles and commentary, etc) and, that is perhaps is the adobe premiere is not able decipher which of the 20 audio track to use. But in Premiere, it imports all the audio tracks with the .m4v video but there is no sound. It’s like the audio tracks are all empty.

I then found a way to isolate a particular audio track from the MKV file and extract and convert that. But it still didn’t work.

Any ideas on how best to create editable files from the MKV files? or more specifically, how do I extract the audio track from the MVK file? (I work on a Mac)

First of all, I would use tsmuxerGUI to demux all of the tracks of interest into separate ones.

The tracks that are not working are very likely DTSHD ones. I don’t believe Premiere will accept those. You can convert the channels to wav/PCM using audacity, I believe. I don’t recall if that will give you lossless or just core audio. Then, you can import the individual channels into Premiere.

If you don’t care about lossless audio, and ac3 is fine for your purposes, you can just directly export a multi-track ac3 from audacity and use that in Premiere. It should be easy to work with in the editor that way.