Heartland

Can anyone recommend a good one from a safe website?

I'd recommend a 2-step approach:

1. download the video from uchoob using a browser extension - can't remember the one I use for chrome but the logo is an upside-down triangle in ranbow colours, very pretty.
2. rip the audi from it using something like Tencoder

You could give this a whirl.
I just tried it & it worked just fine

Urgh. I wouldn't bother at all to be honest. The audio quality on most youtube vids is utter carp.

Google on "Artist's name" + "song name" + 'blogspot'

Then buy afterwards when it's available

IZ.

markfiend wrote:Urgh. I wouldn't bother at all to be honest. The audio quality on most youtube vids is utter carp.

The man speaks the truth. ^

I tried this method to rip a few live tv appearances/Peel sessions etc but by the time I'd burnt it onto CD, the sound quality was v poor.

It helps to do it yourself and grab the best quality available version rather than rely on some automatic process.

http://en.savefrom.net gives you a variety of choices to choose from.

- The best quality is mp4 720p at 192kbps, although there's not always a 720p available (and don't bother with the higher quality 1080p etc that is occasionally available as they still have the same audio track).

- Next highest is "Audio MP4 128" which is an audio-only .m4a file (you'll probably have to add the file extension afterwards as it often downloads without one). There should always be a 128 available, if there isn't resubmit the url and it usually appears a 2nd time. Some audio players won't play them but VLC will, and it'll also convert it to wav if you want.

- Next highest is mp4 360p at 96kbps which you shouldn't need because there's always a 128(see above), except if the file was uploaded approx 4 or more years ago it might have audio anywhere between 128 and 192.

Those 3 examples have 44kHz audio but I think some of the flv files only have 22kHz and can sound really bad in comparison.

But yes quality can be bad, especially when many people use things like Windows Movie Maker to add photos to an audio track and Windows Movie Maker probably churns out files with low quality audio. (Not to mention that .wma audio is the possibly one of the worst audio filetypes there is.) That's made even worse as many people won't bother to save in WMM's highest quality setting and will make do with one of the even poorer default settings.


(I did a spectral comparison between the 128 and 192 files and there's barely a gnats nadger between them, so "Audio MP4 128" is probably as good as you'll get.)

Dan wrote: ... and it'll also convert it to wav if you want.

But bear in mind it won't improve the quality. It will just make a big file.

Pista wrote:

Dan wrote: ... and it'll also convert it to wav if you want.

But bear in mind it won't improve the quality. It will just make a big file.

Oh I know. I meant that sometimes you'll want to edit a youtube file for example if someone has added a stupid intro, and if you have problems converting a (possibly nonstandard) .m4a file, that VLC is one of the things that will convert it.

best one I know is youtube-mp3.org

Insructions are there and it takes seconds. Downloads in the highest quality it can, so just find a good sounding video.

I used http://convert2mp3.net/ several times and was quite happy with it.