I need to record an audio track that seems only available via youtube or blip.fm. There does not seem to be any way to purchase this track and various methods involving Audacity don't work for me. Any tips or useful links are much appreciated. Apologies if in some way I am breaking any copyright laws - that's not my intention. I just to need to record what plays from a website.

Why not just download the flv or mp4 from youtube and use mencoder or ffmpeg to extract the audio ?

I have downloaded the flv from youtube using the Unplug Firefox plugin but I had a problem extracting the audio with ffmpeg. Unfortunately the man page for mencoder is 6500 lines on my system so obviously paging through all that is a real pain. Ffmpeg failed with: and as i don't have a man page for ffmpeg figuring the fix out was not obvious - google time again.

I have found some hints on how to do this with "mencoder -dumpaudio" but thankfully I have found a page hosting an mp3 so I now have a copy. This is something that I would have though was very simple - just recording what was playing - but it tuned into a real chore.

I'm going to continue trying to get Audacity to do this as I'm sure it should be quite simple - maybe just not obvious. I found a page dedicated to this here but I'm having problems with this so far. Thanks for the reply.

What version of lame are you using ? I recommend version 3.97, other versions have problems like that.

Version 3.98.2. Maybe I should downgrade to 3.97 ?

Yes, try it. You may have to recompile ffmpeg.

On my Fedora 13 desktop I have opened a terminal in the directory where my .flv files are and then run: of course you must have the necessary codecs installed for .mp3.

phil

EDIT: Also you could use the FF addon DownloadHelper and when listening to say "blip.fm" use that to d'load the file.