How to download videos and rip audio from YouTube

Reader Harry writes: Can I burn the audio from a YouTube video to a CD? Or get it to my Windows Media Player? If anyone knows how it would be you!

That's quite a challenge, Harry, but hardly an impossible one. Here's how you can do it.

First, rip the video from YouTube. There are numerous online tools for doing this, but KeepVid is the most reliable one I know of and it has an option to automatically convert your files to MP4 format, which will play automatically in QuickTime or Windows Media Player (or you can leave them in the FLV format, which won't). For our purposes, choose to save the file as MP4, which will make the next step much easier.

Note that if you wanted to burn the video to a DVD, this is simple from this point. Any major video-editing application will let you burn your MP4 file directly to disc.

But you want to strip the audio out of the file and burn it alone, without the video. That takes another step. The easiest way I've found to do this is to use a tool called AoA Audio Extractor. There's a $30 Platinum version, but the free one will extract all of the audio from just about any type of video and let you save it as MP3, WAV, or AC3.

You can also choose to save just a portion of the audio (once you load the ripped video file, click Operation then Select Movie Clip; then drag the sliders to the beginning and end points of the portion of the audio you want). This is helpful if you're trying to get just a snippet of dialogue or one song out of a longer video.

Next, just save the file as MP3 and you can play it with any audio playing software. To burn it to a CD, use the disc burning feature in your audio player (iTunes works very well) and you're finished!

The whole process looks complex, but it's actually quite straightforward. Give it a shot and let me know how it goes!