Music Via YouTube

I had read about getting music (and music videos) from YouTube before, primarily from a funny post on Mark Cuban’s Blog Maverick. Never looked into it until now…

Even though I didn’t luck out and did not get an Xbox 360 for $100, I’ve seen commercials for some of the 360 games and one stood out, the Gears of War. I really like the commercial, especially the music. Here’s the television trailer.

In fact, I liked the music so much, I figured I’d try out some techniques Mark Cuban described and get the music from the Gears of War commercial on YouTube. I used KeepVid.com to download the Flash video (.FLV) file to my computer. Now I had to convert the video .FLV file to another format. I used iSquint for that job. iSquint can convert video to many different formats including .FLV files. After a few minutes the audio (and video) were converted to an MP4 format compatible with iTunes. Worked well, but because YouTube goes for speed, not necessarily quality, the audio and video could have been better.

Doing a bit more research, I came across TubeSock. This app does everything I described above in one step for the user. You provide the YouTube link then TubeSock downloads and converts the video automatically. And it can strip out the video, saving the audio only portion as an MP3. Only thing is TubeSock costs $15.

My original goal was to get the song from the Gears of War commercial. And I did, thanks to YouTube, but not exactly how I detailed above. Everything did work, but while reading the comments on the YouTube Gears of War trailer, people talked about the music. It’s called Mad World, and many artists sing different versions. This particular version is performed by Gary Jules or Michael Andrews. In either case, it’s available on the Donnie Darko soundtrack which is available in the iTunes Store in its high quality quality glory. So instead, I spent $1 to own Mad World.

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