You Tube Videos and Conversion Formats

[Creativemind]

Hi All!

What's the best conversion format for converting You Tube videos to audio. I know it's not the best way of obtaining audio for tracks but when it's all you've got.

Is it just best to keep it as mp3 as it's already compressed isn't it.

Thanks!

[sdst]

mp3 320kb or wav

i don't think anyone would notice any better quality

I would only use youtube samples for effects

[LABONERECORDINGS]

If you're recording from Youtube keep as best quality WAV / AIF as possible. Why? Because if you save an already compressed file as another compressed format, you're actually slowly degrading the quality.

Think of WAVs / AIFs as CD quality - you upload the WAV, you play the WAV at full quality on browser (as long as full quality is streamable), you record it as WAV and everything stays clean and intact.

Recording / recoding MP3 from a streamed format already is comparable to tape-to-tape. Noise is introduced into MP3 to help with the file compression smashing (similar to dither, but a different process). Now you record that Youtube source sound (say it's playing at 360px size, which is a lower degraded stream quality) and save it as MP3....being digital you would expect it to stay the same, but MP3 always treats the source file as 'high quality before compression', so you end up degrading the file. Now this can be pretty quiet in the mix, maybe even un-noticeable. If you're using as a 'sketch' file for an idea in a track which is to be swapped later by 'best as possible' instrument then that's cool, but in production sense you want to keep best quality as much as possible throughout the process (unless as mentioned you're sketching ideas)

We've tested a 4 pass single sample 'impulse' on a WAV file that was 4 samples long, just to see what happened. The MP3 1st pass introduced more samples (over 1000, 1124 if we remember correctly, can't remember) using the LAME codec within Wavosaur. So first pass no real issues, slight file increase but that's negligable. 2nd pass we took the 1st pass MP3 and re-fed it again (file open in Wavosaur, export as MP3 320k), and 2nd pass showed a little bit of noise coming in. 3rd pass even more noise, and 4th pass more again. Try doing that to a WAV / AIFF and you wont get anything introducing.

Check here for more on it, a friend of ours djs and she noticed when mixing MP3s for a streaming radio show and recorded it, the output was degraded (the tape-to-tape analogy coming into effect) - http://www.audioanimals.co.uk/news/why- ... r-than-mp3 for more info, and here is the postup the dj done for us http://jungledrumandbass.co.uk/news/mix ... udio-files

TL;DR :: no keep to WAV/AIFF as that will ALWAYS keep the source file quality as it is without any further lossy compression

[LABONERECORDINGS]

mp3 320kb or wav

i don't think anyone would notice any better quality

I would only use youtube samples for effects

This all over

[demt]

mp3 320kb or wav

i don't think anyone would notice any better quality

I would only use youtube samples for effects

This all over

Erm isllways crank it up to max and yes I can tell the difference you tube is still pleasant but I'd prefer higher audio rates

[NekujaK]

I simply drag MP4 and WEBM files downloaded from YouTube into Audacity (freeware audio tool). Audacity automatically extracts the audio, which can then be exported as a WAV or even a high bitrate MP3 (like 192kbps and above).

[theshoemaker]

Have a look here: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=7501778

everything explained you need to know.

You can extract the audio stream with different applications from the video. Be sure not to convert it over and over again. Select the stream with the highest video resolution because normally that's the source with the best audio quality. Not guaranteed, but a good guess.

[EnochLight]

If your intent is to work with audio from video files in Reason, I most certainly would convert them to WAV. When you open an MP3 in Reason, it converts it to WAV to work with it anyway, so why convert it to a lossy file format (MP3) from a lossy file format (MP4, etc) just to be converted to a lossless format (WAV) in Reason?

[gloriatyler]

Try Mp3 juice and YouTube to Mp3 Converter to convert mp3 its works really well.

[jlgrimes]

24 bit wav or aiff if you can.