By Sheldon Greaves

YouTube is an absolute boon to the autodidact. Documentaries, TED Talks, interviews, conference talks, debates are all here. The problem is, you have to be looking at it. It’s video. That’s fine if you don’t mind sitting and watching a screen, but sometimes you don’t have that option. Driving, for instance. Or jogging. Whatever. But with a little help from some free software, you can turn YouTube videos into audio files, to listen to later at your leisure.

As some of you know, I have a podcast which I started back in 2014 or thereabouts called Discovering the Old Testament (also available on iTunes). As part of learning how to podcast, I discovered this incredible free tool called Audacity. It’s a program for editing audio files, but it does so much more. My first job after high school was as a radio disk jockey for KSLM, an AM station in Salem, Oregon. There I learned the craft of editing audio in the “old school” way–cutting audio tape with a razor blade and splicing it together with specially-made Scotch tape. Doing the kinds of stuff Audacity lets you do would have required a room full of expensive equipment.

But I digress. It turns out that Audacity has the capability of extracting the audio track from certain video file formats. You can then work with the audio, maybe clean up the sound, then export it as an .mp3 file. Any audio player in the world can now play the audio version of the YouTube video.

Getting Started

First you need to get Audacity. It’s available as a free download for basically all platforms. This short video will introduce you to the basics:

Next, you need some kind of tool for grabbing and saving video files from YouTube. There are lots of these available. I use one with the remarkably intuitive name of Download Flash & Video. Play with a few and pick the one that works best for you.

Go out on YouTube and select a file to download. Sometimes you’ll see several versions of the same file, differing by size. In my experience, the larger files do not necessarily translate into better sound quality. Perhaps that’s because my ears aren’t what they used to be. Save the file as an .mp4. Some tools do this automatically. I find that it helps to add the .mp4 to the end of the file name before I save it. (Note: I haven’t tried this with other video formats; they might work as well. Or not.)

Now, open Audacity. you’ll see a blank screen with a window for displaying the sound file. I find that I can just drag and drop the file into Audacity, and it starts reading the file in. Soon, you see one or two tracks, depending on whether the original recording was mono or stereo.

However, Audacity may not cooperate, at first. There are certain libraries that you may have to load depending on your computer platform. The Audacity web site has instructions on how to install those libraries. Once you do that, you won’t need to do it again.

Editing the File

Using the cursor, you can select bits of the file and delete them; blank noise, annoying intro music, etc. I also recommend selecting the entire file (click in the panel to the left of the waveforms), select “Compressor” from the “Effect” menu, and execute using the default settings. Without going into too much detail, this will make your audio file easier to listen to in settings with lots of background noise.

When you’re ready, select the “Export” option from the “File” menu, and choose the mp3 option. Add some metadata, if you want. Congratulations! Your video is now a DIY audio book.

Enjoy!