YouTube to MP3

A couple of people have asked me how to extract the audio track from some YouTube or MySpace ditties so they can play them on their iPods. You can buy commercial (and almost always rubbish) programs to do this but, at least if you use Firefox for your browser, you can achieve the same for free in two easy steps...

Downloading the content is simply a matter of installing a suitable Firefox plugin. The nicest one I've found so far, compatible with Fx3, is the inexplicably spaced and capitalised "Video DownloadHelper". This installs an icon in Fx's toolbar which in turn provides a drop-down list of media that can be downloaded on the page you happen to be viewing. YouTube videos arrive in the form of Adobe Flash Video ".flv" files. Once you have these on your hard drive you can play them with the utterly brilliant VLC Media Player.

Extracting the audio from the .flv file is made very easy with FLV Extract, to be found here. Simply drag the .flv file onto the FLV Extract window and the selected bits of the file will be saved back to the location of the dropped file. The video ends up as an .avi file (that Microsoft's Windows Media Player usually doesn't like but plays fine in VLC) and the audio ends up as an .mp3 file.

Before anyone decides to flame me, the same can be achieve using Microsoft's Internet Explorer but as there are no plugins to be had, usually you need to copy and paste YouTube URLs around the place - all very messy. See the light and give up on IE!!! :-)