TR Forums

Anyone know of a decent Firefox/Chrome extension for downloading/converting youtube video to mp3 format? I used to have a decent one, but since lost track of it and can't seem to find anything remotely as functional that isn't shady as can be.

Trying to capture a few guided meditations to move to a smaller mp3 player as opposed to my phone.

Thanks, all.

I use an extension called '1-Click YouTube Video Downloader' in Firefox to download the videos. You then have a choice of tools to locally extract the audio stream from the downloaded video if you just want the audio stream. If you choose the right video, it may already contain an mp3 audio stream so you can avoid any transcoding to avoid any quality degradation.

Notice that I cannot void whether this extension misbehaves in any way as it has access to many things in your browser..

We may be wading into Rule #1 here, but I'm not certain as I don't know the nature of the content you're referring to. A mod might have an opinion here so just be aware.

DancinJack wrote:

We may be wading into Rule #1 here, but I'm not certain as I don't know the nature of the content you're referring to. A mod might have an opinion here so just be aware.

It's being offered on Mozilla's US site and has been around approximately forever so if it were an infringer, it would have been toast long ago.

I generally end-run around problems like this by using High Criteria's Total Recorder. IIRC there's a trial version to verify that it works for your specific application.

JDownloader will do this for you. Its a stand-alone app and not a plugin though.

I go command line and use youtube-dl. With ffmpeg present you can convert to MP3 in one "operation".

/non-mod

Flying Fox wrote:

I go command line and use youtube-dl. With ffmpeg present you can convert to MP3 in one "operation".

I'll second the recommendation for youtube-dl. It's always kept up to date, and it works beautifully.

Thanks, all. Yeah, my fault if the topic was a little close violating any forum rules. I can't really say I've ever waded thru the youtube terms of use either to see what the consensus on this is either.

youtube-dl looks promising. Trying to figure out how to get started, anyone by chance have an example script of what it would look like to plug in a url and extract 128k mp3 audio, don't necessarily even need to save the video?

Youtube-dl has the "interesting" side effect of downloading the stream without ads, so it is definitely a grey area.

I suggest you look into the documentation on extracting audio, changing audio format, and specifying audio quality. You may need to apply a workaround on the https certificate as well. /wink