A Conflagration of Randomness

The winner is: Dirpy - “Dirpy Studio transcodes high quality YouTube videos to mp3s in real time for download”

Today I will tell you how to make youtube videos into mp3s. I have been asked before how to do it and have done it on several occasions if a video on youtube has video unobtainable by other means. Usually this should be a last resort as the quality of youtube video audio is poor. When I say poor I mean it. Typical iTunes downloads range from 128 kilo-bits per second (kbps) – 192 kbps. Very good quality is at the upper bound of mp3s which is 320 kbps. Youtube videos are down to about 64 kbps…not very good, about the quality of an audiobook. Of course the more kbps a mp3 has the more range of sounds it can produce and thus have much higher quality. MP3s already cut the quality of CDs by taking out the higher and lower frequencies, which usually are not able to be heard by most people. Certain audio file formats such as FLAC are called lossless because they allow the audio to be played back on the computer with the same quality as on a CD. However, MP3 is not a lossless format because it compresses the audio to make a much more manageable file size, usually 2-20 mb compared to about 30-100 mb for a FLAC. Anyway, enough about file formats. If you still want to download that rare song from Youtube here’s how:

Method 1:  Let a Site Convert for You

This is a very easy step.  Simply go to the video page on youtube.  Then copy the url of that page from the address bar.  Go to Google.com and enter the search query: convert youtube to mp3.  Usually the top few sites work well.  They will have a form to enter the url of video and then all you have to do is press “convert” and voila, in a moment you have a link to download the mp3 of the video.  A very short and simple method to get the mp3 for your favorite song. 

Recommended sites:

http://www.youtubetomp3.net

http://www.listentoyoutube.com

http://www.video2mp3.net

http://www.vidtomp3.com

http://www.dirpy.com/

[UPDATE]: In the last few months, a new website called Dirpy emerged, and this is the program I highly recommend.  It allows you to edit the metadata tags describing a song, such as Artist, Album, Year, etc.

Plain and simple photoshops:

Halfway Done:

After:

To continue, below are some of my homemade avatars:

For years I’ve been contemplating making a image gallery on a site, but the effort is always too great and I don’t have a gigantic collection, but I’d like to share here a good bit of my photoshops.  We’ll start with my signatures.

So, most of these were made in photoshop, and the novice looking ones were towards the beginning.

When you meet someone new in college, you usually see them face-to-face, so you already know their gender and for the most part you know about how old they are from how they look and from the fact that they are in college.  Since I’ve been meeting a lot of new people, I was wondering, since the typical chatroom introduction, Age/Sex/Location (ASL), is not very suited for the college atmosphere, there must be an alternative that college students could use to get the important information out of a new person with a short acronym.  The acronym I came up with was “Y/M/D.” Now, granted that looks like a foreign date format, with year, month, and day, but that is not what it stands for.  Instead the Y is for year (well maybe it is a date format), the M is for Major, and the D is for dorm.

Year

When you meet someone new on campus you are always wondering what year of college are they in.  Are they a new freshmen? Or maybe they’re just lost because they’re a transfer student who’s really a Junior.  Knowing the year (Freshmen, Sophomore, Junior, Senior, Graduate) of a person is very helpful in knowing how long you will know them (not long if they graduate in that semester), how much you can inform them about the campus or college life, and if they are datable….jk lol Knowing the year of a college student is definitely important.

Major

Definitely one of the first things you find out when you meet someone on campus is what they are majoring in.  This can tell you a great many things such if they have the same interests as you, how sociable they by the stereotypical party Business major or the studyholic engineer, and definitely what they want to do with their life.  Of course, if you’re like me with no idea what to do with my life, knowing my major might not help with that.

Dorm

If you plan on becoming good friends with this person and spending a lot of time with them, you must find out where they live.  You will not want to be in the smelly dorm, but of course you will want to be in the dorm with all the attractive girls (or guys if girls are reading this).  Also, knowing if the dorm is the farthest from campus or not is a good idea.  Many things can be affected by where the dorm is, especially if you need to go there at 7am to get the homework you left there the night before for your 8am class.

So next time you are in a Campus Forum, be prepared with your YMD