[Wed Apr 19 17:28:27 CEST 2011]

Time for a short howto. My youngest told me that he truly liked the first song in this YouTube video and he would really love to be able to listen to it on his iPod. However, we ignore who put the song together or even the title of the song. So, buying it on the iTunes Store is not an option. Both my wife and I tell the kids to purchase the songs they like using their own money, instead of just downloading a pirated version from the Internet. But, as I said, we had no clue what the title of this song might be or if we could even purchase it anywhere. So, time to put the different Linux tools to good use.

First of all, I used youtube-dl to download the video. That was quite straightforward:

$ youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFwcw2IqTEw

That saved a file named mFwcw2IqTEw to my current directory. I then used avidemux to separate audio and video. There are other ways to do this, including command line tools. However, I had never used avidemux before and decided to give it a try. As a consequence of this, I ended with an MP3 that contained the whole audio track for the video. However, my son was only interested in a small chunk of it. So, I now had to figure out a way to cut the first part of the audio track. Enter mp3cut:

mp3cut -o new.mp3 -t 00:00:00+000-00:02:38+000 Runescape_-_Benjamin.mp3

Now, I only had to edit the tags on the actual MP3 file, which I did with the id3 editor. All in all, it was quite fun and my kids learned how flexible and powerful Linux can be. Sure, you can also accomplish all this on Windows or Mac, but I always found it to be far more difficult for one reason or another. Mainly, because many of the tools one finds are commercial applications or shareware with half the functionality crippled. None of those headaches in the case of Linux. {link to this story}