Ripping audio files off YouTube.

[danny92]

ive been using dvdvideosoft youtube to mp3 converter for some time now.
recently the old version of the converter has stopped working so i have upgraded to the newer version and i cant seem to set the converter to download AUDIO ONLY. it keeps dling the video and the audio but i do not want the video file. has anyone had this problem before?. im a high school student and i do not have the $$ to purchase all the songs i like online would cost me a fortune.
and another thing just wanted to ask those audio specialist out there. before my converter stopped working i always dled my audio file into WAV because i heard more kbps from a song makes it sound better because its not compressed? but not all songs on youtube have 720p-1080p so wot happens if i dl a song under 360p to WAV file? does it make it sound better or am i just dling a massive file for nothing. a detailed explanation would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Danny

[buklau]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)

It's equally as illegal to download from YouTube, torrents, usenet or other file-sharing sites, FYI.

'WAV' is known as a lossless format. Lossless formats do not throw away any data when you convert the original file to them, or between other lossless formats. However 'WAV' is an uncompressed lossless format. It produces big files. There are other lossless formats that also compress music without throwing data away, like FLAC or ALAC. They are lossless, but they pack the bits of data snuggly together to make smaller file sizes.

You are familiar with lossy formats, like MP3 or AAC. These formats throw away some data in order make files smaller, at the risk of possibly sounding worse. However, good MP3 or AAC files should sound exactly like the original to most people. The issue is if you keep converting lossy formats again and again, they lose more and more data, so they start to sound bad.

When someone wants to make a YouTube movie, they usually start with an image or video file paired with some audio file that's probably an MP3 to begin with. Then they make their movie, and the movie maker might convert the audio again, losing data. Then they upload to YouTube, and YouTube converts the movie to their format, which loses data again. Then you download the video, and your downloading program wants to convert the audio to MP3, which means you're losing audio again.

If you save to a lossless format, you prevent that last loss of data, but realize the quality of the music you're downloading is already kinda bad to begin with. Imagine if someone made a YouTube video using a song they ripped from YouTube, then you download it!

tl;dr - Saving as FLAC, WAV or ALAC will be 'better quality', but what you're downloading has already been ripped to hell, so it's almost pointless. Do whatever sounds okay to you.

[AdrianK]

Originally Posted by buklau

tl;dr - Saving as FLAC, WAV or ALAC will be 'better quality', but what you're downloading has already been ripped to hell, so it's almost pointless. Do whatever sounds okay to you.

100% Agreed. Lossy > Lossless is completely pointless.

You get a max of 128kbps on youtube audio (even on 4K videos), if you think converting to wav makes it sound better then it's entirely a placebo. 240p has 56kbps MP3, 360/480p has 120kbps AAC and 720/1080p has 128kbps AAC.

If you absolutely 100% must get audio from YouTube (grumble grumble) then download the MP4 version and demux the AAC audio. That saves you one generation of loss.

[R3k]

Works Perfect:

http://rogueamoeba.com/audiohijackpro/

[bwillwall]

Originally Posted by danny92

ive been using dvdvideosoft youtube to mp3 converter for some time now.
recently the old version of the converter has stopped working so i have upgraded to the newer version and i cant seem to set the converter to download AUDIO ONLY. it keeps dling the video and the audio but i do not want the video file. has anyone had this problem before?. im a high school student and i do not have the $$ to purchase all the songs i like online would cost me a fortune.
and another thing just wanted to ask those audio specialist out there. before my converter stopped working i always dled my audio file into WAV because i heard more kbps from a song makes it sound better because its not compressed? but not all songs on youtube have 720p-1080p so wot happens if i dl a song under 360p to WAV file? does it make it sound better or am i just dling a massive file for nothing. a detailed explanation would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Danny

You could try sound flower, set your audio output to one of the soundflower channels then set the audio in to the same one, play the youtube video, record with garageband, cut it and export it.