Recording an online video as a sound file (Recording video as mp3)
I’m gonna first start off by saying this:
In general I do not believe in stealing other peoples work. I’m the guy that still buys CD’s and rips them. Yeah I know, “Ok Boomer“. I’ll take that even thought I’m not technically a “boomer”.
A couple of days ago I posted a video by The Offspring that is a cover of a band called the Clinton Johnson band (I looked high and low and I can’t find the original outside of the Tiger King Youtube version). Anyway, I’m pretty sure The Offspring don’t have publishing rights to it and if they do they haven’t released a single. I wanna listen to it on my phone so I’m gonna convert it. If they release a quality mp3 I will buy it (flac would be better). Yes, I know there are apps that will do this. I don’t trust them and I want control over the process.
So all that out of the way here is, IMHO, the best way to record online video as a sound file. As usual I’m gonna do this short and sweet…
Software needed: Audacity (freeware audio software), and a web browser.
Recording Setup
Operating System Setup:
Regardless of OS you need to set it up so you can record the browser.
In Windows you’ll need to change this option to “What U Hear”.
Go to Settings > System > Sound > Input > choose What U Hear
Next, because Win10 is so pleasant to use, you’ll have to make sure that Audacity can access the recording device.
Go to Settings > Privacy > Microphone > in section Allow desktop apps to access your microphone turn slider to On
Audacity Setup
It should be setup correctly but double check. Input should be “What U Hear”.
Ready, Set, Go
Fire up your browser and navigate to the video > start Audacity > press the Record button > start the video.
Press the Stop button when the video is done playing.
Trim the unwanted stuff and the beginning and end.
Export to the file type you want. No use for lossless here, the quality of the incoming audio isn’t that good.
Add album art if you want. Little video of the process:
Album art I made:
*hey Noodles, You’re a millionaire, you don’t need to buy your shirts at Target 😉
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The Offspring – Here Kitty Kitty
The original song by the Clinton Johnson Band. They sound damn good: Vids here. Tiger King dude DID NOT sing this, he is lip-synching.
JP says
Why would you want to do all that when you can simply use the countless site that offers youtube to mp3 conversion.?
Eric (a.k.a. TweakHound) says
Same reason I don’t use the apps.
JP says
Which app? Just copy the YouTube URL of the video song you want. Paste it on LINK REMOVED It will convert it and then you can download the mp3. Much simpler and way faster. Better quality too.
Eric (a.k.a. TweakHound) says
That site resolves to a Panamanian site that a Google search mentions malware and viruses.
As for quality, you are mistaken:
https://appuals.com/why-converting-youtube-to-320kbps-mp3-is-a-waste-of-time/
JP says
That site was juste an example. Choose one that is ok. As for the quality yours can’t be good either since your source is the same (YouTube) and that you are listening to it on a phone! Furthermore your going from digital to analog and then back to digital. So I don’t think the quality argument hold up here.
Eric (a.k.a. TweakHound) says
You’re the one that claimed better quality. I stated from the outset that, “the quality of the incoming audio isn’t that good.” My previous comment showed that your claim of “better quality too” was not possible.
Donald Harrison says
Other than causing a problem why do you care JP?
Tim says
Thanks for posting those steps Eric. People don’t get those ‘easy’ methods are shady at best and don’t last cause you tube
changes code or modifications. I’ll be rigging your way.
Cormy1 says
I understand wanting to avoid bloat. But for the sake of quality I have to discourage bootleg recordings and re-encoding of already compressed data.
Worse, you run into the problem of mis-matched sampling rates. As seen in your example, Audacity defaults to 44.1kHz sampling frequency, whereas the standard for opus audio (what youtube streams) typically uses a 48kHz sampling rate for audio, which results in “folded-down” aliasing in the resulting files (unless you’re smart enough to apply a low-pass filter to the incoming audio, which I’m not certain you can do with Audacity alone so you have to guess what sampling rates your source is using. I can’t count the number of terrible sounding files I’ve encountered because of this, adding a huge amount of sibilance and high frequency noise to the recording. You might be able to avoid this problem by simply always recording in 48kHz but I have a feeling that will result in its own issues…
The guys behind the vorbis audio codec at xiph talk about this in one of their educational videos on digital audio and digital video formats. Excellent breakdown of why we use the sampling rates we do among other statistics.
As such my recommendation is to familiarize oneself with youtube-dl, the go-to command-line executable for ripping streaming media. This is NOT a recording and no conversion/compression is applied, the streaming source is saved as-is, in the format it originally was. It isn’t designed solely for youtube or solely for audio so it is “large”, being lesser than 10MB but that’s the way you want to go. I believe most other quality services for youtube rips incorporate youtube-dl into their programs.
Eric (a.k.a. TweakHound) says
Thanks, but, I just want to record a song or 2 once in a while that isn’t available elsewhere. I don’t want to have to get a PhD to do it.
Doug says
Very helpful tutorial as always, Eric. Thank you for sharing this. I did run into an issue that you may or may not want to include in case others run into it too. I followed the instructions but at first it didn’t work. Audacity would show input, but playing the file resulted in no sound. After some fiddling I got it resolved by doing the following: unplugged my USB webcam and mic, disabled mobo onboard sound in the BIOS, and went into Control Panel -> Sounds and disabled all devices that weren’t the sound card (GPU, monitors, etc.). After all that the recording process worked beautifully.
Eric (a.k.a. TweakHound) says
Yeah, recording in Win10 can be a PITA.
Thanks!