What is the proper way to grab the audio track directly from Youtube videos with free software? Preferably without decoding/encoding. I want to listen to them on my portable music player.
I guess I shall do it with Audacity? But I will need to install a codec for that too.
I can download the videos from Youtube by the Firefox plugin Flashgot. It saves files in *.flv. Is it the native format or is it a container?
Ps. I pressed "Mark all topics read" by accident. How to mark them again unread?
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Videoo2MP3 is what do you need.
http://www.video2mp3.net
I personally use KickYoutube because it's so easy. You just prepend youtube.com with kick and then bam you have the download page.
Insert original signature here with Greasemonkey Script.
The previous suggestions work well for videos that you are about to download.
If you have already downloaded the video flv (say last week) and want to avoid finding the download again, you can use XMediaRecode Portable to give you just the mp3 audio track from the video.
neutron1132 (at) usa (dot) com
I want the original audio. Maybe a Flash decompiler?
You can use VLC, I've done it. It's a little fiddly, and there are probably better instructions out there than the ones I used. Google it and you'll see.
Easiest way, if you don't mind listening to the track as you record it (and if you do mind, it's probably not a track you want all that much) is to just have Audacity start recording, then play the song, and stop it after it ends. Crop it down and save. You do need the Mp3 encoder (lame_enc.dll) but it tells you how to get it, and it's a free download.
.flv is the Flash Video format. It's a format. YouTube converts whatever it gets to that or .mp4 but .flv is more common.
You can't mark topics unread. It's a one-time thing.
Sorry, having to listen to everything that is captured is rather time consuming and limits the processing you can actually accomplish.
I suppose you could listen/capture every CD you rip, too?
neutron1132 (at) usa (dot) com
Does anybody here know how to get the original audio from YouTube videos without transcoding it into any different format. I don't want to make an mp3; I want to have the original audio data exactly as it is stored in the FLV file.
MP3 is an audio standard format.
FLV is a video format, not audio.
What are you gonna play a flv on?
neutron1132 (at) usa (dot) com
If you're looking to embed the audio in a web page then you could put it in SWF (Flash) format, but you're still gonna need an MP3 for that (since that is the underlying audio format I believe).
You could create a FLV with just a blank, black screen as the video portion but that seems like a complete waste of space if you're only interested in the audio.
I read that different quality settings on YouTube have different audio bitrates, and I don't know what the codecs are. Those are subject to change, and it doesn't matter to me anyway. I would like something that gets it for me so I can listen or reuse it without the extra step of transcoding to some format for listening and transcoding from that format to yet another format if I want to use it for something else.
A Google search yields junk payware that all claim to do it "the best" with "minimal" audio loss. Much of it likely contains malware.
I guess if I really need to, I will look into it deeply and see if a Flash decompiler will let me have what I want.
Push the flv file into a program such as MediaInfo or many media players, and it will show you the encoding, bitrate and so on for the audio portion of the flv.
A quick review of a directory of music videos downloaded from youtube (many in supposed "HD") shows that most are AAC at 62, 63 or 125kbps. Others are MP3 at 128kbps. Whatever you do with the flv file, you aren't going to get better audio out of it than what's there already.
If you really want to listen to the audio and prevent recoding the flv files, just play them on your computer and turn your monitor off (hence my previous question about what you were going to play them with). Sorry if that sounds snarky....
[Edit]
In the mean time, turn your monitor back on and download FLV Extract.
Synopsis: FLV Extract extracts the video and audio from Flash Video (FLV) files without decompressing or recompressing. The video is saved as AVI (H.263/FLV1 and VP6/VP6F) or raw elementary stream (H.264/AVC). The audio is saved as MP3, AAC (with ADTS headers), Speex, or WAV (PCM).
Dependencies: .NET Framework 2.0
[/Edit]
neutron1132 (at) usa (dot) com
I didn't know that media players would output the audio characteristics of a Flash video.
I know about FLV Extract. I was a little paranoid about that program being malware. Also, I didn't know if the formats it saved in were really original. (It claims no compression change, but I am interested in an exact copy.)
The tip about getting the media information puts me much closer to my goal. Thanks again.
No encode, just get the original audio out of the video file.
Have you got to the solution so far?
as stated above is doing what you are asking for.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland