How To Get ANY Music You Want For Free.

[wayneo99]

HI. I didnt see this posted so i thought id share an help some people out with this neat trick on how to download any music or sound coming out of your speakers for free (note: Im doing this on WINDOWS but this should work for MAC seeing as how LAME and Audacity are available for MAC but i dont know if the settings and such are different.)

All youll need is audacity, for those that dont know thats a free audio editing software You can get here: Audacity Youll also need Lame for exporting in audacity which ill provide a link for download here: Lame For Windows.

Once audacity is installed, i personally installed lame directly into the audacity directory and it automatically got found. if you have trouble with audacity finding lame refer here: Lame Homepage

Ok now for the fun stuff when you open audacity this will be what you see.

Now for this you need to focus your attention here....

Note that the options will differ in these drop down menus based on your soundcard set up. mine look like this....

Ok so choose Windows WASAPI and within Windows WASAPI i have the option to select where the sounds output is here
which are my speakers.

I have the option to chose where i want to record from which again is my speaker since there the output and if its mono or stereo and for me it forces stereo since well i have two speakers. those options are here


ok so before you dive in and start recording music you may want to play a sound any sound to make sure your set ups working for you. just hit record (the button with a red circle) then from there proceed to play a sound then hit stop.

it should leave you with a waveform... something like this depending on the sounds recorded:

from there play it back and if it sounds how it did coming out of your speakers your good to go with the settings.(Note that if your settings are wrong it can sound like you put a microphone up to your speaker and recorded it that way and it sounds like shit and you may need to play with settings a little bit. remember different sound cards can make for different settings)

now for exporting your sounds click file/export or CRTL+SHIFT+E like so

within export you have a couple screens 1 of which is this. pretty basic just click save as type for all your audio extension options such as flac, wav, mp3 and so on then name your file and choose its location

But within that screen theres an easy to miss options button.
thats where your going to be able to choose things like MP3 quality, your bit depth, things of that nature. if your sounds are sounding somewhat bad chances are you forgot to use that options button.
please note that the choices given with the options button change with the file type youve selected.

one more thing for that part of the export is if you choose Other Uncompressed Files
youll get all these uncompressed formats in the options window along with a encoding drop down i wont show.

Now your final step is this window.


Just enter the metadata of the song you recorded so things like itunes can fill in the blanks when imported and your good to go!!

So now all thats left to do is go to youtube or soundcloud or wherever and click record in audacity then play on whichever song you wish and it will start recording and when the song finishes hit stop in audacity and fallow the export portion of the tutorial.
PLEASE REALIZE YOUR COMPUTER SOUND LEVEL MAKES A DIFFERENCE ALONG WITH THE SOUND LEVEL OF WHAT YOU ARE RECORDING FROM AKA YOUTUBE OR WHATEVER. SO PLEASE ENSURE BOTH ARE AT MAX FOR THE BEST POSSIBLE RECORDING.

Please tell me if you enjoyed this tutorial and if theres anything i should change/add to make it better or if you need help. thanks for reading and i hope you get some use out of it!!!

Thanks!

[ThaJay]

You could also join What.CD, but this is nice as well. A little iffy IMO because you will have to actually record the stuff from YouTube at 1x speed.

[care71]

This seems like a lot of hard work to me. If you want Youtube music there is a website that converts it and lets you download it in various formats.

http://www.clipconverter.cc/

You can set it to download full videos, or just the sound track etc.

[wayneo99]

its really as hard as hitting record and listening to a song you like. not the fastest way but not all music is on youtube. with this method your not just limited to youtube. but to each his own :) thanks for the website share ill check that out and thanks for the input

[TheWickerMan]

i did this for some concerts that i could not get any other way, but it takes time + is a pain, esp. to cut the tracks up add metadata, etc., plus the quality is only mp3.

[TheWickerMan]

This seems like a lot of hard work to me. If you want Youtube music there is a website that converts it and lets you download it in various formats.
http://www.clipconverter.cc/
You can set it to download full videos, or just the sound track etc.

i use dvdfab to rip the audio track from music dvds to mp3 to listen to on my phone, quick + easy.

[wayneo99]

i did this for some concerts that i could not get any other way, but it takes time + is a pain, esp. to cut the tracks up add metadata, etc., plus the quality is only mp3.

thats some what the reason i shared this. mostly for music you have no other way to download. i wouldnt expect someone to create a library using this method but a song here and there is pretty painless.

[ThaJay]

Also if you want to rip any media from a Web page I recommend you get Torch Browser.

[mtguy8787]

The advantage of this over youtube is that youtube quality can be anything from good to chit. This would allow you to go to say, spotify or something.

But yea, getting into What.cd is easy.

[Coal]

There's so many reasons not to do this. Bad source quality, and the fact that you're effectively transcoding a lossy encode when you do this, mean that it's gonna sound crap. Blank space at the start and end of the track which is not meant to be there is a huge no. Sounds from the tutorial like you'll probably fuck up the dynamics of the track too. And then there's the fact that you have to record and tag every single track manually.

And you've posted this on a site which helps people to get on private trackers..

;)

[ChinaCatINoU]

THANK YOU! clipconverter is one of my new favs.

[wayneo99]

There's so many reasons not to do this. Bad source quality, and the fact that you're effectively transcoding a lossy encode when you do this, mean that it's gonna sound crap. Blank space at the start and end of the track which is not meant to be there is a huge no. Sounds from the tutorial like you'll probably fuck up the dynamics of the track too. And then there's the fact that you have to record and tag every single track manually.

And you've posted this on a site which helps people to get on private trackers..

;)

Bad source quality? well now that depends on the source doesnt it.... youtubes compression algorithm is shit. soundcloud and spotify is a lot less harsh leaving you with the same quality as mp3. compare a song recording with audacity to normal mp3 and look at the frequency spectrum. its the same. i never said your going to be getting flac out of this method... blank space at the front and end? well idk what audacity version you use but mine waits for input before it starts recording and if you choose Sound Activated recording it stops when audio goes below a threshold automatically. so no space between stop and start. if you transcode an mp3 to mp3 itll sound like crap when the original is an mp3? well that just makes for a whole lotta nonsense. only part i agree with is yes its time consuming. but i posted for ppl who dont have an alternative and would gladly wait 3-5 minutes for a song they like to record it and take the 10 seconds to add metadata.

yes i posted this on a site for tracker invites yet for some reason theres a tutorial section and within that a audio/video section where other threads like How to repair scratched cd's cheap and extract the exact audio from youtube tutorials reside. nonsense..

:)

[Coal]

if you transcode an mp3 to mp3 itll sound like crap when the original is an mp3? well that just makes for a whole lotta nonsense.

Congrats (commiserations?), you just failed your what.CD interview.

:)

[wayneo99]

Congrats (commiserations?), you just failed your what.CD interview.

:)

and im fine with waffles. i dont really understand your angle here. from what i can tell your just spamming my thread for no other reason then trolling on a thread thats aimed to help people. and so far your the only one who seems to be so against it. if your not going to input something useful then respectfully stay off my threads.

[Coal]

and im fine with waffles. i dont really understand your angle here. from what i can tell your just spamming my thread for no other reason then trolling on a thread thats aimed to help people. and so far your the only one who seems to be so against it. if your not going to input something useful then respectfully stay off my threads.

So go ahead and upload one of these encodes (or any lossy-lossy transcode) to waffles and see where it gets you. Might wanna take a look at the uploading rules first.

I realise that you posted this tutorial with good intentions, but as someone who appreciates good music rips and encodes, it offends me quite a lot, and I couldn't just let it sit here. I apologise if my posts come across as trolling or spam, that wasn't my intention.