Ableton Forum

What is the best way to capture highest quality audio from YouTube without any quality loss? I'm using a 2015 MacBook Pro laptop with newest OS. I'm most concern with quality and am fine to pay for an application.

Ideally I could record a specific application (web browser with YouTube) while say watching Netflix one only YouTube is recorded.

I purchased ambrosia wire tap pro which worked great on a mac desktop. But wiretap doesn't work on MacBook and as of a few months ago it no longer works on the desktop either. I tried a free audio capture app but the quality was awful.

Any help greatly appreciated!

Soundflower works great and is free.
Some external soundcards also offer virtual internal routing.

[jur] wrote:Soundflower works great and is free.
Some external soundcards also offer virtual internal routing.

If you can get it working. I haven't got it fully working since OS X 10.6 and I've tried all distributions there was at the time.

In the end I got Loopback only to realize RME Total Mix can do recording from any source.

By the way you didn't ever answer my question in the link above:

"Exact version and source?"

dhpetrescu wrote:What is the best way to capture highest quality audio from YouTube without any quality loss? I'm using a 2015 MacBook Pro laptop with newest OS. I'm most concern with quality and am fine to pay for an application.

Ideally I could record a specific application (web browser with YouTube) while say watching Netflix one only YouTube is recorded.

I purchased ambrosia wire tap pro which worked great on a mac desktop. But wiretap doesn't work on MacBook and as of a few months ago it no longer works on the desktop either. I tried a free audio capture app but the quality was awful.

Any help greatly appreciated!

The best way though is to get the MP4 source, open it up in Quicktime Player and Export as "only audio", as long as the audio source is in AAC you should get the original audio untouched. I have done favourable null tests on this, but it probably varies with source.

Recording is more convenient though as usually you just want a snippet. It can also be argued that recording to AIFF/Wav from a source gives you the exact same result as when you convert extracted audio to those formats in Live.

We should also note that much of what is published on youtube is covered by copyright. I'm contemplating re-constructing the few spoken word samples I've used, mostly out of artistic reasons.

I don't know which version I'm using, but it's perfectly working on el capitan. Maybe try here, or there?

[jur] wrote: or there?

The latter I haven't seen. Thanks. I don't need it though.

[jur] wrote:I don't know which version I'm using, but it's perfectly working on el capitan. Maybe try here, or there?

Thanks, this would be amazing if it works. I'll try this when I get home this weekend. I'd like to build up my own large sample library (inspired by a Four Tet interview).

Do you recommend any particular setting when saving 1080 YouTube audio? Is 24 bit 44.1 (what I used to do) sufficient or is greater better?

dhpetrescu wrote:I'd like to build up my own large sample library (inspired by a Four Tet interview).

Yeah, but I'd hope that would also mean using a microphone and recorder in the field.

dhpetrescu wrote: Do you recommend any particular setting when saving 1080 YouTube audio? Is 24 bit 44.1 (what I used to do) sufficient or is greater better?

I'm assuming you mean recording rather than saving (unless you referred to my QT Player suggestion)? Matching the source stream is most likely sufficient. The tool used — Soundflower, Loopback, Total Mix — may affect the stream. At best, the tool adapts to the source, but just as in Live I'd assume most tools uses at least higher bit depth than what the source does, at least when there's multiple sources. There must be some kind of re-sampling going on. I'm not sure how to measure this, nor if it is important or not. So far I haven't cared, if for nothing else I process all samples heavily.

If you have 48 kHz in the stream, it's generally better to record it at that, especially if you intend to slow down the sample later. Though I'd assume the difference is negligible. It might not be a good idea to mix different sample rates in Live either, even if that's possible. I don't think you need to take as much care about a media sample as you do when you record some vocals.

I stopped recording like this because of bad experiences of Soundflower (distortion in live broadcasts), then extracted audio from digital sources like media samples, now I've returned via Loopback if I need to record anything on the fly, that I find somewhat clunky. No distortion though. I will try Total Mix now.

Stromkraft,
Is there a way to actually save her YouTube file directly via QT Player? That would be ideal. I'm perfectly fine to save the entire large audio file rather than a short snippet. I do that anyway since I can never predict which small section of a samples I'll end up using.

PS: recorder is next on my wish list. So far I've been using my iPhone and dropbox. Quality is not great but it's mostly for background air/noise and works OK.

Stromkraft wrote:

dhpetrescu wrote:I'd like to build up my own large sample library (inspired by a Four Tet interview).

Yeah, but I'd hope that would also mean using a microphone and recorder in the field.

dhpetrescu wrote: Do you recommend any particular setting when saving 1080 YouTube audio? Is 24 bit 44.1 (what I used to do) sufficient or is greater better?

I'm assuming you mean recording rather than saving (unless you referred to my QT Player suggestion)? Matching the source stream is most likely sufficient. The tool used — Soundflower, Loopback, Total Mix — may affect the stream. At best, the tool adapts to the source, but just as in Live I'd assume most tools uses at least higher bit depth than what the source does, at least when there's multiple sources. There must be some kind of re-sampling going on. I'm not sure how to measure this, nor if it is important or not. So far I haven't cared, if for nothing else I process all samples heavily.

If you have 48 kHz in the stream, it's generally better to record it at that, especially if you intend to slow down the sample later. Though I'd assume the difference is negligible. It might not be a good idea to mix different sample rates in Live either, even if that's possible. I don't think you need to take as much care about a media sample as you do when you record some vocals.

I stopped recording like this because of bad experiences of Soundflower (distortion in live broadcasts), then extracted audio from digital sources like media samples, now I've returned via Loopback if I need to record anything on the fly, that I find somewhat clunky. No distortion though. I will try Total Mix now.

For the record, in someone searches for this in the future.

...I was able to install soundflower on my MacBook with Pro El Capitan OS. And it works great I can now just route any sound to Ableton and record directly. It worked using the second web link provided in jur's response, the version that had the signature included. The sound quality seems really great.

.... haven't figured out how to route one application to sound flower while routing the other application to a different source. But that's a luxury I can figure out later.

... using audacity without sound flower I found the sound quality of the recording to be very very horrible.

...haven't done it yet but I'm planning to also try out RME total mix for comparison

Thank you for your help!

offliberty.com

dhpetrescu wrote:Stromkraft,
Is there a way to actually save her YouTube file directly via QT Player?

I don't think so, no. There are plenty of other solutions including browser add-ons and dedicated apps. I can't recommend any particular solution. You'd need to evaluate the tools you find. At a minimum it should be able to download the highest quality source MP4 stream (I'd avoid Flash). 720p and above has improved audio in many cases, but this depend on the source.

Hey Stromkraft. Care to share your Total Mix settings for routing audio from your web browser? I'm pretty sure with a little poking around I'll figure it out but any hints would be greatly appreciated!

Here's where he found out: How to record Other Audio SW channels into DAW?

aux cord to an h2n, which saves as wav. it's not DIRECT, but it takes less than a minute to plug it in and drag some files onto your computer and be editing them in Ableton.