On Ripping

If you’re DJing for free in your living room, it is impractical to buy or even find every specific track you want play, but you can’t mix by way of streaming your finds directly from YouTube or Spotify or Last.fm either. None of these sources represent great solutions for quality, but just about every track you get is compromised by lossy compression anyway. Regardless of whether you play a 320kbps mp3 or 128kbps mp3, audible sound is taken away.

One thing to really watch out for though is re-sampling a lossy track, which happens a lot in ripping YouTube videos. One-click mp3! Don’t ever do this, because if you look it up you will find there is no mp3 in a video in the first place. You’ll regret it if you extract an mp3 from a video — it sounds thin and the waveform is thin. There is the possibility of Opus encoding on YouTube amid deep technical meandering, but it’s unlikely you can decode/encode it in your DJ mixing software. AAC is a real presence though, and if you can persuade your mixing software to play AAC, then you can download the video and rip out an m4a file just as you hear it in the video, here’s how, update for media download.

While an 128kbps m4a file is not the greatest you can get, it does equal what is in the video. The price is right, and the effort to tag properly is easily enough accomplished, though even that is far more involved than tweaking tags on most DJ promo tracks or tracks purchased from a reputable store. If you like the sound of the video, at least you’re not inflicting a very poor mp3 cross-encoded version of a low-quality AAC on your listener. Remember, first of all your listener happens to be yourself.