Ripping Music from YouTube

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6 Comments

Comment by Laurence on April 3, 2009 at 11:06am

a lot of things tend to amaze the locals round here, speaking/singing more than one language is one of them :P

Comment by Laurence on April 3, 2009 at 8:57am

@ Heizel, As an Aside, the last remaining bastion of rock Music in the bars of Aberdeen is a "rock Karaoke" night held on a Wednesday. And they don't happen to have a big back catalogue, They did happen to have Rammstein's "du hast" In their catalogue:


However it was only the Version with English Lyrics that they had, and it was the only Rammstein song they had :( However I managed to sing all the German Lyrics from memory. It certainly stunned the host and a lot of other Attendees that night :D

Comment by Derek on April 2, 2009 at 8:26am

And, Heizel, you probably can't sing - so good music doesn't matter! :-) (i'm teasing)

Comment by Laurence on April 1, 2009 at 7:24pm

@ tubejay, I just attempted The high quality download on this, and only got 96Kbps an improvement, but not up to (my own personal) scratch =/ :P

Comment by Derek on April 1, 2009 at 6:47pm

That's some great info, Laurence. Yeah the sound is horrible (compared to REAL rip'd CD music).

I know people that go to YouTube just to listen to music. They can find almost any song and they are singing to it.

Since they are "singing" off key anyway, terrible bitrates don't matter! :-)

Comment by Laurence on April 1, 2009 at 5:30pm

I have done it before in the past, but the sound quality from youtube and other flash video sites - by comparison to Half decent quality sound files - is truly Awful, but I will come back to this in a moment.

what I used to do if I fancied the "sound" off a video, first I'd get goldwave to record a suitable length of wav file on the "stereo mix" option (Ie it digitally records the the sound playing through your speakers internally) If I had to I'd then edt/normalise it within Audacity or creative wavestudio, then I'd convert the Wav to MP3 using Fairstars audio converter, and then I'd have an MP3.

More recently I've come across Super Which can convert both audio and video between multiple formats and is totally free.

Thanks to firefox's Download helper I can save the FLv's on my computer, However when I ran the files through super for Conversion/audio extraction, I made a big and disheartening discovery.

Before I mention what it is, I will state that I'm not exactly a major audiophile. When it comes to music, I Like listening to it at 128KBPS with 44.1 Khz frequency. When it comes to Spoken word and radio plays/comedies I usually don't mind so much (BBC7 Broadcasts at 80KBPS over DAB airwaves in the uk, I usually record/encode/save them at 80KBPS/44.1Khz)

However when I ran these FLV's through Super's analyser, I found that The Audio part of these videos Encoded at low bitrates. From what I've seen, Youtube audio from Flv's tend to vary between 8Kbps to 64KBps mostly in mono. However Other FLV hosting sites like Vimeo, Myspace, dailymotion, and collegehumor are better sound wise, but they are hardly ever encoded above 100KBPS. The most I remember seeing from an FLV was 96KBPS. Now before some bright spark comes up with an idea of encoding a file from a lower bit rate to a higher one, for reasons that will take too long to explain, all that that will achieve is add more file size without adding any more audio quality.

If you're happy enough to have (what I consider) a low quality music MP3 file then by all means, go ahead and rip the audio :P