What’s the best YouTube to MP3 converters?

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RichAffronti
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13 Jun 2017

The YouTube-mp3.org is unavailable now. Does anyone know other best youtube to mp3 converters? no ads, no virus.


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Audiotic
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13 Jun 2017

I'm using JDownloader 2 to download Youtube stuff. It doesn't have an internal mp3 encoder, but you can choose to download all the original Audio from Youtube vids in all available qualities. Usually m4a or ogg. Reason can handle all of them and you can convert to mp3 with Audacity or some other encoder if need be.

Goriila Texas
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13 Jun 2017

I use Corel Studio and save as a WMV file (windows),it's the best imo for phone ie Instagram or YouTube. The audio from my last post was destroyed by Airbit.com where I sell beats at. Don't know what happened to the conversion of that song but the other two sounds just as good as a wave files.

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4filegate
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20 Jun 2017

firefox Add-ons https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... converter/
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abeonis
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20 Jun 2017

I use http://anything2mp3.com/
Online SoundCloud & YouTube to MP3 Converter and Downloader
It works fine
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Janackti
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06 Jul 2017

Why? Some days a ago i still used Youtube.mp3. Maybe you should change another browser. Or you can try videograbby, which is similar to Youtube-mp3. Just paste your link and click to download http://www.videoconverterfactory.com/ti ... oader.html

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Lizard
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06 Jul 2017

I use this one :

http://convert2mp3.net/en/

Like most free sites it will open that 2nd window to advertise something but they are all easy to close once they pop up. I like this one because it is pretty simple and has a nice drop down to convert to 6 audio formats and 4 video formats. It also has a cool search engine to YouTube that keeps you from having to go to the site directly.

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LABONERECORDINGS
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06 Jul 2017

personally.... record to WAV directly via loopback software. Why? because surprisingly if you rip a compressed format (think Youtube included) such as a Youtube MP4 to MP3 conversion, you're actually degrading the MP3 from the off. If you're doing just the one pass then fine but if you plan on using in a mix for some reason as is and then bounce down to WAV then MP3, you're constantly degrading the signal and raising noise level due to the compression algorithm in the MP3 codecs.

One of our friends (Miss Represent, UK DnB dj) brought this subject up of MP3 mixes and rendering to Wav or to MP3 - she found that the rendered MP3 mix sounded worse that the WAV would, purely down to the double file compression.

Our analogy was that the MP3 is technically a 'digital cassette tape', where first pass you'll get a little tape hiss due to the medium plus the rest of the content, then copy that tape to another you'll end up with the master tape being clean and second tape being subject to more 'hiss', third pass (recoridng tape 2) gets noisy again..... MP3 rendering to MP3 is basically the same effect (just digital method of 'tape-to-tape'). This is why WAVs / AIFs are best because really they are like ADAT (perfect reconstruction input and output). WAV to WAV recording doesn't have this issue (unless you're doing different bit depth or sample rate).

So... going back to the Youtube>MP3 thing, if possible record the Youtube clip to WAV directly instead of converting to MP3 to retain as much quality as possible. Quality at the Youtube stage is also subjective because you don't know how many passes the process has gone through in the first place.

If you are using the audio for track sampling and comping / sound design etc, just be aware there is some noise in there, each track you have which is MP3 based will add noise (purely a by-product of the MP3).

It's a shame HD-AAC isn't used more for this type of thing.

What might be a good exercise is, if you're 'lifting' sounds for creative purposes, why not recreate the sound where possible (look up Nu:Tone on FutureMusic iwrc, he reconstructs a riff to get the sound character then makes his own melody, copyright free ;) ). Not saying sampling is bad, but converting to a lower grade signal file first might cause problems later. Some of you might like the sound of MP3 (even 320k sounds good), but this is just a bit of heads up for anyone doing this sort of thing.

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jonheal
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06 Jul 2017

LABONERECORDINGS wrote:
06 Jul 2017
personally.... record to WAV directly via loopback software. Why? because surprisingly if you rip a compressed format (think Youtube included) such as a Youtube MP4 to MP3 conversion, you're actually degrading the MP3 from the off. If you're doing just the one pass then fine but if you plan on using in a mix for some reason as is and then bounce down to WAV then MP3, you're constantly degrading the signal and raising noise level due to the compression algorithm in the MP3 codecs.

One of our friends (Miss Represent, UK DnB dj) brought this subject up of MP3 mixes and rendering to Wav or to MP3 - she found that the rendered MP3 mix sounded worse that the WAV would, purely down to the double file compression.

Our analogy was that the MP3 is technically a 'digital cassette tape', where first pass you'll get a little tape hiss due to the medium plus the rest of the content, then copy that tape to another you'll end up with the master tape being clean and second tape being subject to more 'hiss', third pass (recoridng tape 2) gets noisy again..... MP3 rendering to MP3 is basically the same effect (just digital method of 'tape-to-tape'). This is why WAVs / AIFs are best because really they are like ADAT (perfect reconstruction input and output). WAV to WAV recording doesn't have this issue (unless you're doing different bit depth or sample rate).

So... going back to the Youtube>MP3 thing, if possible record the Youtube clip to WAV directly instead of converting to MP3 to retain as much quality as possible. Quality at the Youtube stage is also subjective because you don't know how many passes the process has gone through in the first place.

If you are using the audio for track sampling and comping / sound design etc, just be aware there is some noise in there, each track you have which is MP3 based will add noise (purely a by-product of the MP3).

It's a shame HD-AAC isn't used more for this type of thing.

What might be a good exercise is, if you're 'lifting' sounds for creative purposes, why not recreate the sound where possible (look up Nu:Tone on FutureMusic iwrc, he reconstructs a riff to get the sound character then makes his own melody, copyright free ;) ). Not saying sampling is bad, but converting to a lower grade signal file first might cause problems later. Some of you might like the sound of MP3 (even 320k sounds good), but this is just a bit of heads up for anyone doing this sort of thing.
I think you can use Audacity to do it this way on Windows.
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Ostermilk
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06 Jul 2017

jonheal wrote:
06 Jul 2017

I think you can use Audacity to do it this way on Windows.
Audacity works great for any audio I can hear on Windows, not just Youtube. The ease in which I can do that may have something to do with my interface though. Even so you should be able to configure any WDM audio device on Windows to work with Audacity in the same way I think.

kiash
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06 Feb 2018

Right now I'm using https://mixload.co to convert youtube to mp3. it works just fine to me.

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pushedbutton
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06 Feb 2018

VLC media player does it all, there's no need to depend on a website being up.
Copy the youtube URL into VLC, play it, go to the playlist, right click, open the information, get the URL from the location, copy that into your browser, download the original youtube video if you like or just select save/convert from VLC and paste the new URL into VLC and choose the format you want to save it to.
It's easier to do than to explain.
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EdGrip
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06 Feb 2018

I use ClipGrab for this purpose - it has the option to save the original (unconverted/raw) audio. https://clipgrab.org

I will look again at using VLC.

EdGrip
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06 Feb 2018

Thanks for that, Pushedbutton - got the VLC method down!

I'm a bit confused about the format options, though.
Say I look at the "information", as you described, and I see the audio format of the video in question is Ogg Vorbis.
If I select Ogg Vorbis in the converter dialog, will it just save the raw audio file from within the video wrapper? Or will it do an unnecessary Ogg-to-Ogg conversion step? There's no "save original" option in the converter dialog, unlike ClipGrap.

ClipGrap is more streamlined for this task, but I'm all in favour of not having more programs than you need, so I'd like to know more about VLC's approach.

EdGrip
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06 Feb 2018

Further findings:
I picked a short-ish YouTube video at random (this one:)


I saved it as "Original (audio only)" using ClipGrab. This produced a 932kB MP4 file.
Using VLC said the audio codec was "Vorbis Audio (vorb)". So I did "convert / save" as described by Pushedbutton, and selected "Ogg Vorbis" as the format. This produced a 953kB OGG file.

On the YouTube site itself, under "stats for nerds", it says the audio codec is "opus". I looked Opus up, and it's a codec that can be contained by.... Ogg and MP4! (among others).
So one theory is that VLC and ClipGrab are both right, but both picked a different container for the Opus codec audio. I speculate wildly that the 19kB discrepancy in file size is container-related.

However, ClipGrab stripped the audio and created a finished .MP4 file much, much faster (about 10 seconds total) than VLC - which seemed to work through the video in real time. Either real time is just how VLC rolls, or the extra time was that of VLC doing an unnecessary lossy tape-to-tape conversion.

Also: Not only does ClipGrab save the audio much, much faster than VLC - it's also much faster to work with, with much fewer steps.
Last edited by EdGrip on 06 Feb 2018, edited 1 time in total.

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theshoemaker
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06 Feb 2018

EdGrip wrote:
06 Feb 2018
Thanks for that, Pushedbutton - got the VLC method down!

I'm a bit confused about the format options, though.
Say I look at the "information", as you described, and I see the audio format of the video in question is Ogg Vorbis.
If I select Ogg Vorbis in the converter dialog, will it just save the raw audio file from within the video wrapper? Or will it do an unnecessary Ogg-to-Ogg conversion step? There's no "save original" option in the converter dialog, unlike ClipGrap.

ClipGrap is more streamlined for this task, but I'm all in favour of not having more programs than you need, so I'd like to know more about VLC's approach.
jdownloader 2 is by far the easiest. You have clipboard watching, so you don't even have to paste. You select which Video to download and wether you want to convert and strip of the video and just use audio.

But like mentioned before. Recording the direct stream from system audio is the best. I use soundflower for this
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EdGrip
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06 Feb 2018

theshoemaker wrote:
06 Feb 2018
But like mentioned before. Recording the direct stream from system audio is the best. I use soundflower for this
Why is it best? In doing so, you're taking a compressed stream (the audio codec from the video) and recording it as a WAV while it plays back. It's a lossy-to-WAV conversion. It's more of a faff, and involves playing through the whole video in real time.

If you use ClipGrab (or similar) to save the original audio stream from the video, you've not lost anything yet. You've just copied the compressed audio data from YouTube's server to your computer, wrapped in an audio file format. From there, you can convert it to a WAV later at your leisure, keeping it compact until you decide to use it.

In either case you're doing a lossy-to-WAV conversion. Assuming ClipGrab (or VLC) can just take the audio component of the hosted video file and wrap it for you, that's a totally lossless transfer. There's no lossy-to-lossy-to-WAV taking place.

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theshoemaker
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07 Feb 2018

Depends on wether you do an audio conversion or not. In detail jdownloader uses ffmpeg du demux(extract) the audio stream. This can also be lossless. Normally when doing sampling for me Reason is easier, as I can just record the snippets directly into Reason.

The lossy-to-WAV conversion happens always while playback ;) also depends on the source audio material provided in the youtube clips, which most of the time is aac/mp4

For me the discussion has just been a matter of wether you do a another WAV-to-lossless conversion to mp3 afterwards and convenience.

soundflower is: Hit Play on yt > Hit Record in Reason
jdownloader: CMD+C / or on windows CTLR+C the URL and the download of the file starts automatically bringing you a popup of the video and what to do with it's content, like extracting audio. Which source material to use (as there are different video resolutions and therefore different bitstreams with different quality)
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EdGrip
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07 Feb 2018

theshoemaker wrote:
07 Feb 2018
soundflower is: Hit Play on yt > Hit Record in Reason
jdownloader: CMD+C / or on windows CTLR+C the URL and the download of the file starts automatically bringing you a popup of the video and what to do with it's content, like extracting audio. Which source material to use (as there are different video resolutions and therefore different bitstreams with different quality)
That's how ClipGrab works - it watches the clipboard for compatible URLs.
But recording directly into Reason would often be better, especially in instances where you're after one particular line from a film or TV show - dropping a 1hr audio clip into Studio One and finding that one line is boooooring! (Do not try dropping a 1hr audio clip into Reason - you will be able to go and make a cup of tea in the time it spends "analyzing" it.)
So I'll look into Soundflower - thanks for the tip!

EdGrip
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07 Feb 2018

No Soundflower for Windows, so I'm looking at VB-Audio Voicemeeter / Virtual Cable
or
JACK 2

rooty
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13 Mar 2018

I use https://mp3-tunes.org/ is safe & no have ads !

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syncanonymous
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14 Mar 2018

I thought the OP question was best mp3 converter for youtube?

Whenever I have done mp3 related conversions and enocoding, I found Adobe Soundbooth (nowadays, it is Audition) to be really good, specifically for mp3 manipulations. YT capture, is another matter. Audition isn’t really free.

I find VLC a complete pain to use for file conversions. As edgrip was saying, VLC excells at manipulation ogg, ime. VLC is Not so happy working with mp3.

as far as best goes, I wouldn’t know. I should think there are benefits from real-time format conversion like recording a wav from YT playback. Obviously noise in signal path can be an issue. That said, recording audio specifically encoded for YT play back direct from YT should yield the best “possible” fidelity, no. Otherwise, there is potential for conversion anomalies with a straight conversion utility.
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02 Jul 2018

The answer to this topic seems to be very well addressed/answered. I am going to lock this thread now because all the latest posts on this topic are from newly registered users who are trying to spam, in my opinion.
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