How to Rip Audio from YouTube (UPDATED)

Since most of the sites and methods that allow you to do what I outlined in my previous post are no longer working, here is an alternative:

First you will have to have Audacity installed:

Download it here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/

Audacity is a free, easy-to-use and multilingual audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to:

• Record live audio.
• Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
• Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files.
• Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together.
• Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
• And more! See the complete list of features.

About Free Software

Audacity is free software, developed by a group of volunteers and distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Free software is not just free of cost (like “free beer”). It is free as in freedom (like “free speech”). Free software gives you the freedom to use a program, study how it works, improve it and share it with others. For more information, visit the Free Software Foundation.

Programs like Audacity are also called open source software, because their source code is available for anyone to study or use. There are thousands of other free and open source programs, including the Firefox web browser, the OpenOffice.org office suite and entire Linux-based operating systems such as Ubuntu.

We welcome donations to support Audacity development. Anyone can contribute to Audacity by helping us with documentation, translations, user support and by testing our latest code.

Ohloh has statistics on the value of Audacity development. The Ohloh “badge” at the bottom of each page on this site shows updated summary values. We set up the Ohloh pages about Audacity so the statistics show only the values of Audacity-specific development, excluding the third-party code libraries Audacity uses.

Here comes the fun part! You have to make sure you download the LAME encoding library to use in conjunction with Audacity. 

You can get the library here: http://lame1.buanzo.com.ar/

LAME is a library that allows some programs to encode MP3 files. LAME is free, but in some countries you may need to pay a license fee in order to legally encode MP3 files.

If you download the ZIP version, you have to open it to extract the library archived inside it, which depending on the operating system you downloaded for will be lame_enc.dll, LameLib or libmp3lame.dylib.

To use it with Audacity, you can put it anywhere you want, but the first time you want to export an MP3 file, Audacity will ask you for the location of this file, so you’ll want to remember where you put it.

For FFMpeg/LAME on Windows:
Lame_v3.99.3_for_Windows.exe
Please support this download server. Any donation is HIGHLY appreciated (NOT required to download lame, lame is free).

ZIP OPTION:
libmp3lame-win-3.98.2.zip (Issues? Some help HERE and HERE)

For Audacity 1.3.3 or later on Mac OS X 10.4 and greater (Intel or PPC),and Audacity 1.2.5 on OS X 10.4 and later (Intel)
Lame_Library_v3.98.2_for_Audacity_on_OSX.dmg (ZIP version here)

FFmpeg v0.6.2 – ZIP version – extract to any location:
FFmpeg_v0.6.2_for_Audacity_on_OSX.zip

Now you can begin using the program as such:

How to Extract Audio from YouTube Using Windows and Audacity

Steps

1. Set up your computer’s devices appropriately in order to capture what is called “computer playback”

   • Open the Control Panel.
   • Click on Hardware and Sound and select Sound.
   • 

      Click on the Recording tab.

     Click on the Recording tab.
   • 

      Disable the Microphone by right clicking and selecting Disable.

     Disable the Microphone by right clicking and selecting Disable.
   • 

      Right click on an open space in the window and select Show disabled devices.

     Right click on an open space in the window and select Show disabled devices. Stereo Mix should appear on the list of devices.
   • 

      Right click on Stereo Mix and select Enable.

     Right click on Stereo Mix and select Enable.
2. Open your browser and find the YouTube video from which you wish to extract audio.
3. 

    Open up Audacity and click record.

   Open up Audacity and click record.
4. Play the YouTube video from which you wish to extract audio.
5. Stop recording with Audacity once the YouTube video has finished playing.

   • If the YouTube video is longer than the audio you wish to record, stop the YouTube video at the desired spot before you stop recording with Audacity.
6. 

    Save the recording in the format most appropriate for your purposes.

   Save the recording in the format most appropriate for your purposes. For most people this is the WAV format.

   • Click on File
   • Click on Export

Cheers! 😛