Extract Audio Directly from YouTube with Mediacoder

YouTube isn’t just for watching videos. A lot of times you can find great music in the form of old songs that aren’t available anywhere else online. Or you come across a fascinating audio track and get tempted to use it elsewhere.

Extracting audio from a YouTube video usually requires you to download the video to your hard drive, convert it to another format and then extract the audio track from it. Well, I’ve been doing a little experimenting and discovered that you can extract audio directly without downloading the video from YouTube. The secret of my success: MediaCoder.

As far as transcoders go, Mediacoder is one of the best out there. It requires a bit of a learning curve but it’s capable of a lot of stuff. I’ve been using it almost exclusively whenever I need to convert a video or any media files.

To extract the audio directly from a YouTube video, navigate to the video in question and copy the link in the address bar. Then, open up Mediacoder, click on the Add button and select Add Url. Paste the link of the video in the box that pops up.

Now, you need to adjust the settings of the converted file. On the lower left-hand side of the GUI are the different transcoding parameters. Click on the Audio tab and select the encoder format. For example, if you want an MP3 file, you would select the Lame MP3 encoder. Then, click the Video tab and uncheck the box ‘Enable Video’. This ensures that only the audio is transcoded.

Once your transcoded settings are in place, click the Start button to begin converting your file. It only takes a few minutes or so. After transcoding is finished, play back the transcoded file and check if it’s complete.

I’ve done a lot of testing and this method works for most YouTube videos but not all of them. I think that has something to do with the format used in the original file upload. Still, this is a nice trick to try out whenever you want to quickly extract an audio track from online video.

Have you used Mediacoder to extract audio before? What do you think of this tip? What software do you use to extract audio from a video clip? Let me know in the comments.