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.