We’ve told you how to download music before using Freecorder. This is the link to that post: Freecorder downloads videos and music. In that process, you record the music from the video in real time. In other words, if the song/video is five minutes long, it takes you five minutes to download it. Here’s another way to do the same thing but in much less time:
1. Go to Youtube (or any other video site that has music videos…except Myspace), and find the video(s) that you want to save to your computer.
2. You don’t have to click on the video, just find a list of songs like this:
Find the video you want and right click it then choose ‘Copy link address’.
3. The link to the video is in the blue area, the hot link. All you have to do is right click, choose Copy link address. Do that then go to the next step.
4. Head over to http://offliberty.com/ . Off Liberty is a website that automatically saves any url that you give it. It will save a webpage or a video or music from that video. Here’s what you see:
Click in the space, right click and choose paste. Then hit Off.
5. The link is pasted into the slot, then you hit the word OFF. OffLiberty goes to the site and saves the video and audio that it finds. Let it do it’s work and this is what you see:
The yellow is the MP3. Follow the instructions.
6. The instructions are quite simple. Again, we are right clicking on something and choosing from a menu. Right click the yellow box and choose ‘Save link as…’. Here is the menu:
Choose ‘Save link as…’
7. What you are doing here is saving the MP3 file, complete with whatever title the video had on Youtube. The file will be saved to your normal download folder. Just click OK and you’ve got the file on your computer. You can always rename it later, don’t worry about. You can change it something that you will remember, as opposed to the title on Youtube.
There you go! Fast, relatively easy and totally safe. You’ll never have to use a torrent or Peer to Peer site again. Let us know how this works for you, OK?
4. Right click in the link space in the middle of the page and choose ‘Paste”. The link you just copied from Youtube is now pasted into the link slot on Offliberty.com. It will look like this:
Paste the url you just copied into the slot as shown here.
5. Click the OFF button and wait a second or two.
6. Right click the slot, now yellow and filled with instructions, choose ‘Save link as’ and the MP3 of the video you chose is saved to your computer. You can, of course, tell your browser where you want the file saved. The screen looks like this:
The slot is yellow until you right click it, then it turns black. Click ‘Save link as’ and choose where to save the MP3 file.
7. If you want to save the video, click ‘I want video file’. You could save the MP3 first and then save the video file, whatever you want to do.
This system is infinitely faster than any other system we’ve found to save MP3s from Youtube videos. We hope you like it and use it.
LPs or long playing records have been around for decades, probably over 60 years. Records themselves date back to the ’20s I guess, maybe even prior to that. The really old ones were 78s and very low fidelity. 78 means that the records spun around at 78 revolutions per minute. The later version, the LPS, spin at 33 1/3 RPM and can be considered high fidelity. Even though most artists release their material on CDs now, we still say that they are releasing a record as opposed to CD. Some very cool artists are releasing their material on LPs as well as on CDs. A tour through any upscale stereo shop will include at least a few turntables on display. Last week I saw a magnificent $13,000 turntable at Bay Bloor Audio here in Toronto.
Playing an LP is a bit cumbersome, seeing as how you have to have the turntable, an amp and speakers. Since you can’t take your LP music out for a walk or a drive, most of us are recording our LPs to our computers, converting them from analog to digital using Audacity. Here’s how I do it.
Download Audacity and install it. Audacity is free, part of the open-source community. Audacity is available from Source Forge here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ . Once you have it installed, download the MP3 encoder here: http://lame.sourceforge.net/ . The lame encoder is necessary to encode your Audacity files into MP3s. If you don’t plan on using MP3s , then it’s not necessary.
Next you need a turntable. There are all kinds of them out there, some use USB ports to get the sound from the TT(turntable) to the computer but I prefer a direct-drive Panasonic or similar unit. The USB ones are fine for a few LPs as long as you don’t really care about quality too much. Now there are some very good USB TTs but you’d have to spend a bunch of cash to get one. My Panasonic came from the local Goodwill store and cost me ten bucks. I had to change the plug end of the cord from a European prong thingy to a North American two prong plug but that was pretty easy. There are two types of older TTs; direct drive and belt drive. Direct drive means that the motor is directly connected to the platter (the flat thing that the records sit on) while belt drive units have a system of pulleys and a belt that goes all the way around the platter, using friction alone to turn it. Obviously, the belts wear out and stretch over the years. You get speed variations, known as wow and flutter, sometimes. Direct drive offers the best speed control. If you can get a DD TT, you’re all set.
My set-up routes the sound from the TT to a receiver and then to my computer. I don’t have a standalone preamp to boost the TT sound, making the receiver a necessity. The receiver has a preamp in it but I think a standalone unit would be simpler. All of the USB TTs have a preamp built into them. With my set-up, I can monitor the sound through my speakers attached to the receiver or I can monitor it through the computer which uses a different set of speakers. Regardless of how you do it, you have to be able to hear what you’re recording. There are too many variations to explain each set-up here. If you need help, make a comment with a question below or ask me on Twitter.
Fire up Audacity and set your recording levels while you’re playing an LP. Each LP is different. An AC/DC LP has different sound levels than a Glenn Gould LP, for instance. Try to get the loudest parts so they don’t peak. Just about peaking is fine but don’t let any part of your LP slip into the upper red zone. Here is a screenshot:
The red to the right of the L and R should be near the far right but not right to the end.
Once you have all of this set, start recording on Audacity then start your LP. There will be some blank space at the start but you can edit that out later on. Now, do you leave the spaces between each song in or do you record each song separately? Complete album sides are nice but so are singles, you can work that out on your own. If you are going to work on the sound that you have just recorded, save the file as an Audacity file as opposed to exporting it to another format.
If your LP is a bit dirty or scratched, you will most likely have to remove some noise. If you don’t want to adjust your MP3 player all the time, you will want to normalize or make all of your recordings the same level. Audacity is free but that doesn’t mean that it is simple. You can do simple things with it or some very complicated things with it. If you want a perfect recording, you can adjust and tweak to your heart’s content. This guide isn’t a complete how-to by any means. You’ll have to figure out what parts of Audacity that you want to use and get it working on your own set-up. There is a very handy guide here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/documentation
Good luck! There are simple units that will do all of this automatically but, you know what they say, you get what you pay for. Give me a good, used turntable and Audacity and I bet my LPs will sound better than yours. Take the time to do it right.
Thanks for reading!
a little bit of hi-tech, a little bit of common sense and a lot of fun
