For some reason my husband loves to turn to YouTube when he's in the mood for a particular song that isn't in his music library. If you think about it, the video sharing site is the perfect place to get your one hit wonder fix, so it only makes sense that someone figured out how to keep the audio and get rid of the video.
Dirpy is a new online service that lets you convert the audio from a YouTube video into an MP3 that can then be played via iTunes, Zune, or any other digital music player. Just paste the YouTube video url into the conversion bar on Dirpy's front page, then select what you'd like to name the track, the quality you'd like it to be converted at, and even where in the video you'd like to start taking audio out of.
It's a nice service to use if you need to grab audio to use for a silly project and don't really care how good the audio quality is, but it does raise some copyright issues. Is converting audio from a YouTube video into an MP3 the equivalent of stealing music or is it like recording music off the radio onto a cassette tape?
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Comments (6)
There's another way, if you have a Mac. Just bring up the video you want in Safari, go up to Window/Activity while the video is playing, select the item in the Activity window that is still loading (i.e. "345k of 3.8Mb") and double-click it. It'll download the video to where ever you save your downloads. Then (download and) fire up MPEG Streamclip. Load the video, then Export Audio. Select the parameters you want for the mp3 and you're golden...
MPEG Streamclip is free, by the way...
Yes legally this is the same as other methods of file sharing. On youtube when someone uses a music track to back up their video content without authorized consent it is illegal. But, given that that is a somewhat common thing to do youtube has made a deal where they will allow it to continue to reside on the site with links to legal music buying sites.
Also recording songs off the radio with a tape deck is technically illegal also but it doesn't eat into the margins enough for the record industry to care.
Very useful!
I use iRecordMusic on my Mac.
Audio Hijack Pro ($39) or free version (10 minutes max per file) will digitally record anything that comes out of your Mac. It also has timer recording that goes to the URL of your choice.