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.

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I have to admit that I was a Metallica fan back then in the times of Ride The Lightning and Master Of Puppets and denied their existence after their release of the Black Album. My denial was confirmed by their stance against file sharing and their fans which was full of blatant mistakes and an inability to understand what was going on.

It surprised me that they decided to offer 20 Metallica live albums from 1982-2003 for free on their website Live Metallica which is selling live albums from their recent concerts as mp3 and flac on the site as well. Well the 20 albums are free to download after registering at the website which just takes an email and password.

Don’t expect the downloads to be that easy. They are offering a Java download manager or single downloads of the files. Single downloads mean that a user would have to right-click files about two hundreds times to download all of them. Most live albums have a playing time between 1:30 and 2 hours and mostly contain classic Metallica songs. All test downloads used a bitrate of 192 Kbit.

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TV Series Papercraft can be seen as an addition to the Cubeecraft Papercraft series. Papercrafts are little toys that come on paper. They have to be printed, cut out and assembled which is where most of the fun lies. Cubeecraft had some wonderful designs like Iron Man, Stromtroopers, Indiana Jones and as their latest edition the Vault Boy from Fallout.

TV Series Papercraft concentrates on popular tv series like 24, Lost or Prison Break and delivers some interesting looking designs of popular characters of those series. If you look at the 24 category you find papercrafts for Jack Bauer, Tony Almeida, David Palmer and Mike Novik among others. Each tv series contains several character designs which can all be downloaded and printed without additional costs.

The site has a interesting vintage tv series category with stars from the past including Magnum, CJ from Baywatch, Michael Knight from Knight Rider and B.A. Baracus from the A-Team.

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Something interesting for the weekend. If you feel that the usual retail usb sticks are to boring you might want to give designing your own a try. You can do that at the Fabidoo website which not only offers the creation of unique usb sticks but all kinds of like animals or hearts which would probably make a great gift for loved ones.

Back to the usb sticks. The customer can pick one of the colorful templates and edit that or start the process with a white usb stick. The sticks can be rotated, zoomed in and out, opened and looked at from every possible direction.

It is then possible to change the colors of all the parts, apply text, upload images and frames to create fantastic looking usb sticks. Just look at some of the results, they look really great.

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It can be hard at times to follow musicians if you are a fan of them: Where are they right now, when is their next live concert, when does their next CD come out, will they come to my town? Most people get their music business news from music magazines, band websites and music portals but it is still difficulty to find the information that you are craving for.

Enter Cloud Speakers, a music business news aggregation site that offers more than a slightly unusual layout and choice of color. Cloud Speakers displays music business news on their pages. It has a vast database of artists and labels which can be followed on page, by email or RSS news feed.

They collect news, reviews, audio and video and make it available on their website. The user can filter the four main categories, if he is only interested in reviews he can only display those. The audio category is a very appealing category on the website. Users can play the music that is listed in that category. The frontpage of Cloud Speakers is offering an mp3 player that is showing and playing the latest mp3 as well. (A similar feature is available on individual artists pages)

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