
YouTube-mp3 agrees to shut down - walterbell
http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/youtube-mp3-agrees-to-shut-down/
======
fimdomeio
This is getting very weird. Using youtube-dl: Probably ilegal, but no one
cares because you need basic technical skills and it's very dificult to chase
people who use it. Using an add blocker during streaming: Very likely ok until
people also start getting arrested for going to pee during tv comercials.
Using youtube or spotify in a public place: This one makes peoples brains
hurt, let's not even consider it.

In the middle of all this how much are the artists getting for the streamings?
how popular must one be for getting more than a cup of coffee worth of
royalties each month?

If authors are not making that much money do the copyright laws make any
objective sense? Since after all they were created first and foremost to
protect them. If they are not protected than music be free/libre because of
the cultural value it has for humanity.

~~~
tachyonbeam
Before we had the technological ability to record music, musicians made their
money by performing live. Then, when the radio came around, artists would
perform live on the radio. I think that ultimately, this is what we may be
going back to, at least in part. The record industry used to say that mp3 and
downloading would be the end of music. What I think they don't realize is that
music is as old as humanity.

~~~
chii
> music is as old as humanity.

but only recently has music been a huge money maker. It changes things when an
art becomes a business with profit motives.

~~~
JohnKacz
Are there any other examples of a medium making this transition?

~~~
pheldagryph
Storytelling, and narratives.

Though, I suppose either music or storytelling may have been relatively more
important, and larger percentage of the total activity of pre-historic human
groups, than those 'industries' are for us today.

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bo1024
I think this is an important ideological gray zone for copyright. The RIAA
wants to have their cake and eat it too -- use Youtube to publicly and
'freely' distribute music to your computer (along with ads), but also
completely control what your computer is allowed to do with the music. I don't
see what kind of case they'd have against youtube-dl, which runs on your own
computer, but I guess they can argue a site like this is "copyright
infringement" even if it does the same thing as youtube-dl, just because it's
a middleman website in between the user and youtube rather than code on the
user's own machine. The reasoning is not too far from suing a CDN for
copyright infringement because it doesn't have explicit license to copy and
distribute the music.

~~~
golergka
> use Youtube to publicly and 'freely' distribute music to your computer
> (along with ads), but also completely control what your computer is allowed
> to do with the music

And how is it radically different from a restrictive open source license? You
can say the same about software engineers, how post their code publicly and
'freely', but also control what you do with that code.

~~~
hanbura
Fundamentally it's very similar. That's why there is a proliferation of
licenses. The MIT vs BSD vs Apache vs GPLv2 vs GPLv3 vs AGPLv3 debate is
fundamentally a debate which restrictions are reasonable and which go too far

~~~
golergka
We can have a debate about what is reasonable in terms of music too. But once
the copyright owner, be it a musician or a software engineer, decides on a
license, we can't just violate his decision, even if we decide that it's
unreasonable.

Speaking as a musician, I have posted my tracks on Youtube and supplied a link
to download them for free on Bandcamp. But when I released a music with a
label, I delegated all the distribution rights to that label, and they made a
decision not to offer free downloads. I may disagree with their decision, but
it's theirs to make since I signed the contract.

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intoverflow2
So glad I exist in a timeline where youtube-dl exists.

Having culture locked up in these corporate sites that can wipe it out or
remove it in less than a second makes me so anxious.

~~~
shortoncash
I feel like things will change in the next few years. One of these
decentralized video or storage services might take off and change things
forever. Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but ever since blockchain technology
got rapid adoption (at least among technical people), I can't help but think
we're a few user interface innovations on top of decentralized technology away
from really seeing a completely different kind of internet.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Forgive my ignorance (I haven't found a resource that clearly discusses
blockchain without conflating it with cryptocurrencies) - but can we even have
a blockchain-based tech that doesn't burn enormous amounts of electricity just
to operate? If not, then I don't see how blockchain can do anything but make
things worse.

Also, the real problem isn't technical here. P2P file sharing technologies -
from BitTorrent to IPFS - work well and efficiently. The problem, which makes
the Internet media evolve towards big players owning CDNs and not towards
IPFS-like network, is legal liability. When I watch a video of a wrong colour
on YouTube, I'm protected by Safe Harbour. If I watch the same movie over
BitTorrent, I risk having my life ruined by copyright laws. As long as this
can happen, we won't have fully decentralized media.

~~~
shawabawa3
> but can we even have a blockchain-based tech that doesn't burn enormous
> amounts of electricity just to operate?

Look into Proof of Stake (PoS) - people are looking into more efficient
blockchains (although there's some controversy over whether it will work)

~~~
TeMPOraL
I've heard of the term, but from what I understand, no actual working
implementation of that concept currently exists, right?

~~~
mclehman
Decred is currently mined using a mix of PoW and PoS.

Current supply[1]:

PoW-mined: 43.5% PoS-mined: 21.8% Development Subsidy: 7.3% Airdrop: 13.7% Dev
Premine: 13.7%

Blackcoin is also PoS mined, and NXT reaches consensus using PoS but if IIUC
is not mined per se.

1: [https://www.decred.org/](https://www.decred.org/)

------
fh973
There is also [http://convert2mp3.net/](http://convert2mp3.net/) (from
Germany). If I understand correctly, the reasoning is that a download is
private copy, which is allowed in Germany, and can't be forbidden by the
Youtube ToS.

Unfortunately there is no information about the case available in English,
here is some German:
[http://convert2mp3.net/index.php?p=legal](http://convert2mp3.net/index.php?p=legal)

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meirelles
Google also is trying to wipe out any reference they can to youtube
downloaders. The publisher's Adsense account may get suspended/terminated if
they link to (or mention!) any well-known youtube downloaders.

~~~
ruleabidinguser
Seems like an abuse of power

~~~
thrillgore
At one point Google said they would never do it, which was the first sign that
they were totally going to do it.

Google is a for-profit monopoly. Stop thinking they're the fucking good guys.

~~~
SAI_Peregrinus
The only people who ever feel the need to say "trust me" are the ones who are
trying to lie to you.

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seabird
The music industry is a scummy vampire industry that is desperately grasping
at any life it can suck out of people that actually do something productive.
We will undoubtedly see the RIAA fade to effectively nothing in the next few
decades, which is a fitting end for an organization that only exists in its
current incarnation because of a long history of shafting people.

In the age of the internet, there is very, very little that a record label
will do for you that will leave you better off. Producing and distributing
music is approaching triviality. Arranging concerts and touring isn't easy,
but no full-time job (which is effectively what music is for you at that
stage) is, and there are plenty of independent acts that have done and still
are doing it. More often than not, all industry involvement will net you is
you losing out on revenue from record sales with few upsides.

I'll be glad to see the RIAA and record label asswipes go belly up in a blaze
of tears, weeping, and gnashing of teeth, all while wondering why their
business plan that consisted entirely of leeching on actual productivity
failed.

~~~
chrshawkes
I used to think I didn't like the RIAA but they are on the side of good. There
is a reason just about every content creator whether a musician or not is on
their side.

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jessriedel
Folks in this thread may be interested in "4k Video Downloader", an elegant
and simple GUI for fast downloading of YouTube audio and video with multiple
resolutions and options.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_Video_Downloader](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_Video_Downloader)

I use this with VLC to watch lectures with fine-grained control over the
playback speed (i.e., 1.7x, not just 1.5x and 2x).

~~~
chrshawkes
More tools to steal money out of the pockets of those who provide content.

~~~
bo1024
...in the same sense that bathroom breaks or channel-changing for TV ads are
tools to "steal" money from the networks? Sorry, but nobody promised to watch
the commercials.

I don't think it's fair to imply some sort of moral contract that if I serve
you videos with ads, you're obligated to pay attention to the ads as well as
the content. You are free to do what you want, including pay someone else to
cut the ads out for you or install a tool that does it for free. I have to
accept these possibilities when I choose how to distribute my 'content' and so
do the advertisers.

(I realize that we're currently in an "equilibrium" where a lot of 'content'
on the web is ad-supported so it's difficult for creators to distribute in any
other way. That's unfortunate both for creators and users.)

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konart
Use youtube-dl manually or via telegram bot
[https://telegram.me/utubebot](https://telegram.me/utubebot), for example

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Multicomp
Long since moved to Peggo. Works just as good but even has a video saving
option

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captn3m0
Related to youtube-dl, I recently found out streamlink[0], which is a nice cli
tool that does streamripping from various websites (it even supports twitch
streams) to help you play these streams on the player of your choice (instead
of the browser). Of course this also circumvents ads as a side-effect.

[0]:
[https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink](https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink)

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FiveSquared
[https://en.savefromnet.com](https://en.savefromnet.com). Thank me later.

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chrshawkes
This doesn't just affect musical artist but all YouTuber's whom rely upon the
platform to earn money for their work via advertising. Much of their content
can instead be stream ripped and distributed without any earnings
capabilities. I'm sorry, that's wrong in every way.

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Synaesthesia
Never heard of it! However there’s keepvid.com, clip-converter and of course
youtube-dl.

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slazaro
I use jdownloader, which can also download from many other sites.

~~~
xrisk
youtube-dl can also download from a wide variety of sites, contrary to what
its name would have you believe.

~~~
spookyuser
Yeah it's more like *-dl. It's hard to find sites it doesn't work with.

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agumonkey
Reminds me of the nice chrome extension that allowed playing youtube music in
the background. Streamus IIRC; and youtube was very nasty toward the guy.
Anyway farewell ytmp3

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zeep
I usually put this in my .bash_aliases file:

    
    
        alias youtubemp3='youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3'

~~~
creatonez
If you don't have to, don't re-encode it. All youtube videos nowadays have
audio encoded in OPUS format, which compresses way better than MP3

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tekmate
so, theoretically, if i used the asm.js port of ffmpeg.js to do the conversion
clientside that would be ok?

~~~
sigio
Why bother transcoding... youtube will gladly serve you various audio and
video formats seperately. Just download the opus stream and save to a file.
Let te user transcode to mp3 if they need it.

~~~
striking
You need to put the video and audio streams together, though. Which requires a
transcode pass.

~~~
satysin
Not a transcode just a mux of the different audio and video files into a
container such as MP4 or MKV. Pop ffmpeg in the same directory as youtube-dl
and it will do the work for you. A simple 'youtube-dl [video url] -f
bestvideo+bestaudio' will get you a nice single file with the best audio and
video :)

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RealityNow
Copyright law is so outdated. When are we going to end these parasitic
liberty-infringing laws?

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staticelf
This sounds like an awesome opportunity for me to create such a site.

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h2youtube
try [https://h2converter.com](https://h2converter.com), best tool convert
youtube video to mp3 ;)

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Bromskloss
Pff, that would reencode the audio anyway. Unacceptable!

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FiveSquared
[https://en.savefromnet.com](https://en.savefromnet.com)

