When I read that the No. 1 way that teenagers are listening to music is through the online video service YouTube, I thought they were nuts. Then I recalled my younger cousin’s graduation party where they had a Mac connected to a sound system playing YouTube videos to an overly energetic, makeshift dance club in the driveway. No crate of albums, no turntable or fancy disc player, not even an iPod. No real music collection of any kind: YouTube was the DJ. All I could think of was data plans, connection speeds, and the impracticality of streaming video online just to hear a tune. And to think, this is how majority of today’s teenagers are listening to music.
There has to be a more practical solution. And there is: it requires a little more work up front. But it’s closer to shopping for music at the music store; just treat YouTube as the Music Store, and not your own personal DJ. The goal is simple: you want to manage your own music library, while continuing to use YouTube as the primary source of discovering music. In fact, YouTube is taking music discovery very seriously. They have enhanced their music search and discovery features quite a bit over the last few months. Creating and subscribing to channels, sharing links to new music — all that remains the same. And in the end, you can have the best of both worlds. By following these steps, what you and up with is your own YouTube-discovered music collection that you can take anywhere with you. And that you can play even when there’s no available internet connectivity nearby.
Here’s how you do it.
The first step of the process is to get the music off of YouTube and onto your hard drive. A quick search online, and you will find plenty of YouTube-to-MP3 converters for Windows. Add “for Mac“ to the Google search string and you will be directed to MacUpdate.com where you will find MediaHuman YouTube to MP3 converter. With MediaHuman YouTube to MP3 all you need to do is browse YouTube’s new Music site with Safari and simply drag and drop the URL of the music video you want to convert into a music file on your Mac. You can keep it up and running within view of Safari while you surf YouTube checking out your favorite channel’s newest songs. There are a couple of configuration preferences you need to set up just once, like where you want your music downloaded and the quality setting for the music format you prefer. But for the most part, it is a simple and straightforward process.
The problem with this technique is that the tags used to identify the music file are not complete. You will realize this when you import the music files into your favorite music player. The music files will have the title of the track as well as the artist, and you can enter the album if you know it a the time of the downlaod, but thats about it. If you want to complete your music collection in style, you will have to update the music file’s ID3 tag.
To do this, you will want to use a tagging application that will update the music files for you. You will want something that can identify the songs automatically, and once identified, look up the songs’ information online in order to fill in the album, artist, year, genre and other information. And MusicBrainz Picard does a great job of doing just that. You open your converted music files and click the look-up button on the toolbar. Picard will then try to match the music file based off of the existing information like the title of the track, the name of the artist, and even the length of the song. And if that does not work, you can also “scan” the music files using Picard’s fingerprinting capabilities. Picard uses an online service called AcoustID to identify each song and perform the look-up into MusicBranz’s online database. Once you have located the entry in MusicBrainz database that matches the song you download and converted from YouTube, you simply save your changes. Now you can organize and access your music files the way you like. No manual editing of information, Picard will do all that for you.
Now that you have your music downloaded, converted and tagged, you can import the songs directly into iTunes and start using them throughout the iTunes ecosystem. An alternative would be to upload your music files to Google’s online music service Google Play. To upload your music files you will need to use the Google Play Music Manager. The upload process is quick and easy. Simply select the music folder you want to upload your music files from and continue. Once uploaded you can access the music files from anywhere.
For iOS there is an app from Interactive Innovative Solutions called gMusic that can be used to access your Google Play music library. Once installed you log on with your GoogleID to access your Google Play music library. The best feature of gMusic is that you can download your music onto your device for playback when you are not connected to the internet.
It may seem to be a lot of steps from a lot of different companies just to get music files from Google’s YouTube online video service over to Google’s Play online music service. But most of the steps are automated once you have all of the tools installed and configured. Just imagine going to a coffee shop, using the free Wi-Fi, browsing YouTube for the latest music, downloading, converting, tagging and uploading to back to Google Play. Comparing days past to the present, it would be like listening to the radio, hearing a song for the first time, and adding it to your music collection directly from the radio. If YouTube is how you discover new music, let it be your Radio, DJ and music store all in one.
DIGITAL JUICE
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