Netbook Network

There’s quite a few tools available for ripping the audio out of a YouTube video. Some of the tools are available online, some are browser plugins or extensions, and some tools are for the desktop. Extracting the audio from a YouTube video can be handy if you want to grab music from a music video, listen to a lecture, and more. Here’s a guide on how to perfectly extract the audio from a YouTube video for the highest quality possible.

The following guide is for educational purposes only. Netbook Network does not endorse or support copyright infringement.

Tools online and for the desktop may be good for YouTube audio extraction, but they’re not perfect because most of them will encode your audio into another format that you’re more familiar with, such as MP3. Every time you encode your audio into something else, you lose quality.

YouTube audio is encoded into AAC, which is the highest quality available audio provided you don’t have the original uploaded video. The point of this guide is for you to get your hands onto that AAC file that’s in the video.

You’re going to need a two tools: a YouTube video downloader which supports HD video such as the online tool Keep-Tube, and SUPER, a free media encoder tool. Video files have a video stream and an audio stream, and SUPER is capable of “demuxing” the two streams, or extracting the two streams into to separate files. What we’re looking for is the audio stream from a YouTube video.

Let’s get started.

1. Find the YouTube video you want the audio of and download it in the highest quality possible. For YouTube, higher quality video means higher quality audio, and you want the highest quality audio available.
2. Once the video is saved onto your disk, open SUPER. This may take a minute.
3. On the upper left of the SUPER interface, there will be two radio buttons. Press the lower one to set SUPER into demuxing mode.
   
   
4. Drag and drop the video into the area below that says “DROP A VALID MULTIMEDIA FILE HERE“. Your video should now appear in the files list.
5. Right click anywhere in the SUPER interface and open “Output File Saving Management“. Select where you want to save your extracted files.
   
   
6. Press “DeMux (Active Files)” at the bottom of the SUPER interface to start demuxing. This may take a minute.
7. Two files should reside in your save location, an audio stream and a video stream. Look for the AAC file.
8. This is the highest quality audio you can get from a YouTube video! If you can play back AAC, then excellent. If not, you’ll have to use a program like winLAME to encode the audio into a format of your liking (remember, this will reduce quality,  but winLAME is an excellent audio encoder).

That’s all for now, folks! Enjoy your YouTube rips!