How to Extract A Song From YouTube (Or Other Video Sites)

Before talking about the youtube video extraction, here is a quick self-promotional note: If you love good games, you may want to go and check the concept art, screenshots, and development notes for my first iPhone game – Henophobia.

In those few days I was getting a dozens of hits for the Inner Life Of A Cell video, and lot of them were through search phrases like “Inner Life Of A Cell download music”. So, I got interested how one can extract the music from YouTube, and it turns out it is pretty easy… Here is how…
(If you are not interested in the process, but came here looking for the music just go at the bottom of this post, and download the mp3 file.)

Step 1 – Downloading the video

1. If you don’t have Firefox go get it here, and install it.
2. Install the DownloadHelper extension – using Firefox go to the bottom of that page, and click Install now.
3. After installing you need to restart Firefox to continue. After the restart you will have a new button on the toolbar, looking like a little person.
4. Go to the YouTube page from which you want to download the video (in this case here). Note you can use this extension to download flv files from other video sites (like Google Video) too.
5. The person on the toolbar icon will start to rotate. Click on the arrow beside it, and click on the first choice. The flash file containing the video will start to download. (click Ctrl+J to open the download window if it doesn’t open automatically)
6. When the download is finished, right click on the downloaded file, and choose “Open Containing Folder”. There you should have the flash (flv) file. Copy it to the Desktop.

    (Alternatively you can try YouTube downloader site.
    Just paste the address of the YouTube video there, and click “Get Download URL”.
    When you do that, you will be given an URL from which to d/l the file.
    When I tried this, the file was downloaded, but I had to rename the file, and give it flv extension.
    But once you do that, you should be OK)

Step 2 – Extracting the music

1. Download the AoA Audio Extractor 1.1 (it is free)
2. Install it, and start it.
3. Once the program starts, click the “Add Files” button, and choose the flv file you copied to the Desktop.
4. Change some of the options if you want, choose where to export the mp3 file, and press the big orange Start button.
5. If everything is OK, the extraction will start, and you will get mp3 file in the folder you chose.

Step 3 – The Music

    And here is the result – the music from the Inner Life Of A Cell video.

UPDATE:Tim in the comments points to the Vixy service, which does (I didn’t try) the transformation automatically and let you download the result. If you are not interested in having control over some details of the transformation, just go to Vixy, paste there the YouTube address, and choose MP3 transformation. BTW, I don’t know if it works with other video sites.

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