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antihero
Who on earth would want some sort of horrible transcode of a transcode?
fleitz
The same sort of people who would watch 240p video.
[dead] pwmanagerdied
You're dating yourself. YouTube hasn't been limited to 240p videos for many years; they're rarer than 1080p videos these days.
jps359
You'd be surprised how many technology-illiterate people do these things.
snookca
I admittedly have used these services to procure obscure tracks that aren't available via iTunes or other means. That band who did an a cappella cover? No download link on their site or anywhere else? Youtube to mp3.
antihero
In that case, it looks like the industry could much better fix the problem by providing legitimate means to get these tracks :)
loudmax
Yes, the audio quality of mp3s is much lower than a CD. This format will never catch on.
duaneb
I don't know about transcodes, but there are often live recordings or rare recordings that I can only find on youtube.
Splines
If you grab the source video yourself you can demux the audio using ffmpeg (I've done this for some live performances that I wanted to listen to offline).
slig
People that can't tell the diference between DVD quality and HD. People that listen to music using their crappy cellphone speaker.
fleitz
The only thing this can do is increase the quality of MP3s on the internet.

The audio is as heavily compressed as the video, not much point in ripping that.

technoslut
>The audio is as heavily compressed as the video, not much point in ripping that.

Kids don't care about the quality otherwise they wouldn't be taking this avenue in the first place.

I can't help but think a service like Vevo is playing a big role in this along with the RIAA. Music videos are consistently the most watched videos on YouTube and Vevo has been making a big stink about leaving YouTube.

eli
You never taped a song off the radio?
fleitz
Yeah, but that was before '94 when I installed my first MP3 player, since then not too much. Mostly CD rips and downloads, I don't think I ripped anything after about '98.
joshbaptiste
shrug.. youtube-dl + ffmpeg.
ngokevin
youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format=mp3 -l LINK
drcube
Can you still just copy and paste from your /tmp folder in Ubuntu? I can't do that on Arch, so I just use the FlashGot Firefox addon.
gsa
Not anymore, a Flash upgrade broke that sometime ago.
naner
Quite awhile ago Flash started "deleting" the file in /tmp as soon as it got the file handle. You can still get the file handle using 'lsof' while the video is playing. It would be easier to just use a tool like youtube-dl or clive (or a browser extension) to grab the videos, though.
xgMz
I wonder if Google has a practical way to stopping them, reading from the article saying they've blocked the sites (by IP? ... so they'll use TOR?); I guess blocking is the best they can do aside from legal action (if that even works overseas)?