Some of the world’s best lectures, debates, and music are available on YouTube for free. But we don’t always have time to watch videos, and streaming audio over cellular data will bankrupt us.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could just rip audio from a YouTube video? Then we could listen to him whenever we wanted.
Let’s take a look at the question of whether it is legal to rip audio from YouTube. It depends. Just assume everything is copyrighted. The content owner can mark the video as Creative Commons, public domain, or simply indicate in their description that anyone can use it.
But to be completely sure, contact the content owner and ask for permission. Check out YouTube’s frequently asked copyright questions.
We will use an interview with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as a practical guide for ripping audio from YouTube. Yes, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
We are going to use VLC Media Player from VideoLan for this. This is a great free media player available for Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Android, and Linux. So if you don’t have it, download and install VLC Media Player now.
The method we are going to use is very similar to using VLC to rip YouTube videos
- Go to YouTube and navigate to the video we want to work with. Copy the entire address or URL from the address bar of your browser.
- Open VLC. In Windows, choose Media> Open Network Stream. On a Mac, choose File> Open Network.
- Enter the URL of the YouTube video in the Network URL field. On Windows, click Play. On a Mac, click Open. The video will start playing. Let be.
- While the video is playing, on Windows select Tools> Code Info. On a Mac, click Window> Media Info.
- At the bottom of the window that opens, there is a long address in the Location field. Copy this and close this window.
- Stop video. In Windows, choose Media> Open Network Stream. On a Mac, choose File> Open Network.
- Paste a long address in the network URL field. Click the down arrow next to the Play button and select Convert.
- In the window that appears, click the Profile drop-down menu and select Audio – MP3. We could choose Audio – FLAC or Audio – CD if we need that.
- Click the Browse button next to the Target File: field and choose where to save the MP3 after conversion. Click Start. VLC will start ripping audio from YouTube video and saving it in MP3 format.
The audio ripping process will be much faster than video playback. This video is over 10 minutes long, but it only took about 2 minutes to rip the YouTube audio.
That’s it!
You don’t need to go to some spam site full of creepy ads to copy YouTube audio. Just use VLC. If you haven’t used VLC before, read more about this. Not only is it a great video and music player, but you can also stream to Chromecast, fix flipped videos, and capture still images from movies and shows
Do you know of any great public domain or creative YouTube channels that we should follow? Or even just good royalty-free music or free audiobook sites? Let us know in the comments.
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