Downloading Music Using YouTube

By now, everyone's heard of YouTube and knows that it is an awesome repository containing videos from all over the world. The phrase 'YouTube it' is almost becoming as popular as 'Googling' something and for good reason too; the site now hosts nearly 83.5 million videos on 3.75 million user accounts (also read an interesting article "Youtubers: Take Them with a Grain of Salt"). Even more astonishing, ten hours of additional video is added every minute. From people getting hit in the groin to a baby's first steps, YouTube is without a doubt the largest collection of videos in the history of humankind.

While the videos of people's idiotic acts may be entertaining, the vast amount of music videos on the site are often overlooked. A search for even the most obscure of bands is still likely to return results. Take a note of a useful sheet "Top 5 MP3 Players for College Students Under $200 ". Unfortunately, the music available on YouTube is hidden away in a Flash video file, making it near impossible to access without using the site. If there was only a way to get at those files we would be able to access almost any song ever created and quickly download tunes for our listening pleasure.

Well, there is actually a way to download videos from YouTube and convert the audio content of those videos into MP3s, which can then be played independently of the site. While the legality of such software is in grey waters, it can be done in theory. If the user was to get explicit permission, YouTube would be an excellent way to quickly and easily download music.

If the user was to download music from YouTube, he or she would need a program such as BeinneSoft's free YouTube Downloader, which reads a particular video's page address and retrieves a direct link to the video itself. To do this, a user would simply open up the program, find the music video they wanted to download, then paste the web address of the video into the YouTube Downloader. The software would then automatically locate the actual video file itself and begin downloading a file to the user's computer.

After the download completes however, there is still the issue of stripping the file down to its audio and converting it into a standard audio format that can be used on a computer or audio player. For this, a user would simply need to select the downloaded Flash file in YouTube Downloader's conversion dialogue and instruct it to produce an MP3 audio file out of the chosen video. After the file creation is complete, the user would be left with an MP3 that they could then place on their digital audio player.

Remember, that copyright laws still apply to videos uploaded onto YouTube, so a user that uses a third-party downloader program would have to get permission from both the recording artist and the person who uploaded the video. To do this, a quick private message asking for permission will usually suffice. Plus, there are millions of works on the site that are in the public domain, meaning they are free to distribute. Even better, the YouTube Downloader works on hundreds of other sites and can convert Flash video files into other formats, besides MP3 audio files.

From a theoretical standpoint, using YouTube as a way to download music through a third-party downloader application would be an awesome way to unchain the massive collection of content available on the site. We could then use it anywhere we wanted to, regardless of whether a device was Internet-enabled and had Flash installed. From simply filling up our song libraries to getting clips for the bus ride, getting audio or video files would be as simple as pasting in an address and clicking a button.