I don’t know why the MAFIAA (MPAA, RIAA, etc) is so vehement about eradicating mp3s from the interent but then allowing all kinds of music on youtube, but it’s trival to download the FLV from youtube for listening and watching later, to convert it to other formats, or to strip the audio into mp3 for ipodding later.
I think because people look at the low resolution of youtube videos and think that the audio is bad quality too, but the truth is it’s usually quite good. In my opinion, the videos are not worth saving, but the audio is.
There’s all sorts of good music on youtube–from music videos to soundtracks to picture montages with good songs behind them to great jazz performances. You may not want to spend hours staring at a tiny box on a computer screen, but I bet there’s some music in youtube that you’d listen to in your car.
I was going to write an online converter that would take an input youtube URL, grab the video, use php and ffmpeg to convert the flv to mp3, and use lame to encode and tag the mp3 and allow you to save it, but after googling, I found out it’s already been done. Try this google search to find online flv converters. The first one, vixy.net, didn’t work for me, but the second one, convertdirect.com, did. Just plug in a youtube URL, choose convert to MP3 (audio only), click convert, and save the link.
For instance:
Check out this sweet Oscar Peterson video:
I used convertdirect.com to convert the mp3 and it gave me this link:
http://www.convertdirect.com/output/7122857251.mp3
(don’t know how long they keep the mp3s up, but try downloading it! You can rename it to Oscar Peterson – You Look Good To Me.