The Internet offers many different options for users to increase their song collection. Among the options are to record Internet radio with tools like Streamwriter or Stream Harvester, or to download and convert Youtube videos to do the same. This guide explains how you can increase your iTunes song collection, or your song collection in general, with the help of YouTube.
For that we need to look at two things. First we need to download and convert YouTube videos and then add them to the song collection. There are lots of options to download YouTube videos, but in this guide I will concentrate on methods that make it as easy as possible.
First option is the web based service Youtube to Mp3. It is one of the easiest to use if you only want to download and convert a handful of YouTube music videos to mp3 to add them to your iTunes music collection.
All that needs to be done is to paste a YouTube video url into the form on the site. A click on the convert video button displays information about the video and an option to download the mp3.
Add-ons are available for Firefox and Google Chrome that display the download mp3 link next to YouTube videos directly making the process more comfortable.
The second option is a desktop program for Windows that can mass download YouTube videos and convert them to mp3 locally. Download and install Free FLV Converter from the developer website over at Koyotesoft. Make sure you pay attention to the installation dialog if you do not want a new search provider or search page in your default web browser.
Once installed enter a search term on the Search Video page and click on Search. This displays a list of YouTube video matches. Before you now start to download videos switch to the TubeQueue tab and select Audio only as the output format. This automatically converts downloaded videos to mp3 so that it is not necessary to convert the files manually. You can configure output settings in detail here. If you prefer a different output bitrate or audio codec you can configure it here.
Switch back to the Search Video tab and click the Download button to start downloading all the selected files. The program saves and converts the videos automatically so that you end up with audio files that you can import into iTunes.
Adding the new songs to iTunes is actually not a big problem. One could drag and drop songs or folders to the iTunes window to add them, launch them in iTunes or select File > Add File or Folder to iTunes.
The two methods describes above can be used to add new songs found on YouTube to iTunes or the local mp3 collection. Is it legal? That depends largely on your local laws. Consult a lawyer if you are unsure.
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It should be noted that some of the videos found on Youtube have their audio encoded in AAC format. If you download those videos (or pick them from your cache), you can use something like FLVExtract to extract the AAC audio file.
FLVExtract (as well as some other handy tools) can be found here:
http://moitah.net/
I know it doesn’t much matter on an MP3 player, but, is the sound quality of youtube songs too poor to play on a robust PA system, like at a wedding or something?
I too prefer to extract the actual audio file unaltered/converted.
HD MP4 videos usually contain a higher bit rate aac file
which I extract using YAMB to get the pure stream.
It’s sad that you equate people’s song collections with iTunes. That software is possibly the worst piece of garbage available.
I’m not equating anything.
I am no audiophile, but I couldn’t imagine using such poor audio quality that you would get from YouTube.