Dirpy makes it easy

Remember that whole sampling YouTube thing? Well Dirpy does all the prep work of sampling a YouTube video. No need for extra software, just enter a URL and it’ll convert it to an MP3 for you.

Hard Drive Crash

FFFFUUUUUUUUU-

I have backups, but the recovery will take some time. It seems I’ll be taking a little vacation from mixing, sampling, or anything else that requires doing something creative on my computer.

Sampling YouTube – if you have to, it works

Sure, if you had the money, equipment, and access to dope record stores around town, you will find some sick sampling material.

This guy. More skills than you.

However, if you’re like me and have none of these things,  you have to get creative. The audio for a lot of these YouTube vids have improved considerably. It’s not audiophile quality or anything but, considering that some of these videos are of music from several decades ago, the source isn’t going to be all that great anyway. In the end, ripping the audio track off of YouTube videos can be a pretty good way to find a sample. Here’s how to do it. Did I mention for free?

You will need two things:

1. A simple video extraction program. For Mac, I use MPEG Streamclip. There’s also a Windows version. Both are free.
2. A simple audio editing program. You probably already have one, but if you don’t, get Audacity. Again, free.

Finally, you need to save the YouTube video to your computer. This is actually very easy thanks to PwnYouTube. Simply add “pwn” before “youtube” on any video link. Lets say you want to sample the audio off of this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx8Ya2VNk2k

Just add “pwn”:

http://www.pwnyoutube.com/watch?v=Vx8Ya2VNk2k

The site makes a link of the video you can save to your computer. MPEG Streamclip can handle both video formats PwnYouTube outputs.

In MPEG Streamclip, select the section of video you want and go to File -> Export Audio.

That’s it! From there, you can use your audio editing program to convert it to whatever file type suits you. Plug that into your sampling software and you’re good to go.

Badly needed update

First off, to answer a few of the comments on the Auto-Tune post, Ableton Live and Antares Auto-Tune have been updated to newer versions of the ones I wrote about many months ago. The walkthrough is probably old. I intend to write a new one, but haven’t had the time.

The reason I haven’t had time is because 1) work and 2) I’m making an instrumental album! A select few already have a rough cut. It’s going to be really short: 10-12 tracks, and probably not all that good. But, it has been a lot of fun to make and I hope people enjoy it.

My last session recording the album

Keep checking this page. It’ll be out some time in the next month or so.

Well, at least I tried…

Well, RPM is over and I failed miserably – barely got 5 tracks down. The good thing that came out of this was learning a better approach to making music – having never done this before. Either way, I’ll keep trying to make beats and post them up here!

…And another one:

‘Nati Soul