Random Monday : Extracting MP3s from YouTube Videos

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YouTube is a pretty nice site to find and listen to songs that you can't buy from shops like the excellent Canon Rock arranged by Jerry C and performed by Jeong-Hyun Lim aka funtwo a couple of years back. Being the usual slowcoach, I only discovered it a few weeks ago :(

It's all fine when you have internet access to listen to songs like these, but what if you want to listen to them on an MP3 player on the way to work?

Convert them to MP3s of course :) Here's how:

1. In YouTube, copy the URL link on the video page.
   
   
   
   
2. Go to www.videodl.org, paste the link we copied in step 1 and click Get It!
   
   
   
   
3. Wait for a while and a Download Link will appear. If the page does not display the Download Link, refresh the page and click on the Get It! link again.
   
   
   
   
4. Right click and choose Save Target As ... to save the file somewhere you can remember because this YouTube file contains the MP3 that we want. Remember to rename it as xxx.flv.
   
   
5. Download eRightSoft's Super transcoder (Windows only). Look for a link labelled Download and Use and scroll all the way to the bottom on the next page to download the 25+ MB installer.
   
   
6. After installing Super, start it and you should see a screen like the one below.
   
   
   
   
7. The settings should be as follows:
   • Select MP3 from the dropdown list for the Output Container
     
   • * VERY IMPORTANT * - ensure that DirectShow Encode is NOT checked. Flash video which is the format that YouTube uses to store video, cannot be decoded by DirectShow, that's why this has to be off.
     
   • At the blue Audio section, the default settings are set to 44100 Khz, 128 kbps, Stereo ala CD quality audio. You can change these settings but remember that the output quality is dependent on the original audio source in the YouTube video.
   
   
8. Right click anywhere in Super to display the menu and click on Output File Saving Management to select the output directory for your brand new MP3.
   
   
   
   
9. To extract the audio in our YouTube video to MP3s, right click again to display the menu, click on Add Multimedia Files and select the YouTube video we saved in step 4.
   
   
10. Click on Encode (Active Files) at the bottom and enjoy!

BTW, correct me if I'm wrong but ripping copyrighted songs from YouTube is considered illegal in most places. Use the above info at your own discretion :)


MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
BestPractice 1.01 - Speed Up or Slow Down Audio
MediaCoder - Alternative Media Transcoder
Downloading Movie Trailers from Apple Trailers (I)
Downloading Movie Trailers from Apple Trailers (II)