This weekend I heard a tune which I really wanted to listen to properly. It was on the radio but it’s nowhere to be found on platforms like Spotify or Deezer. It wasn’t released, but it was all over places like Mixcloud and YouTube. That, then, is where the next problem lies, because YouTube used to – until recently – not want you to download videos.
I say until recently because YouTube Premium is now here, and for £11.99 per month you can download videos. This is great but, let’s face it, it’s £11.99 per month. Streaming music offerings are cheaper than that for the most part.
So I was recently in the situation where I wanted to grab a tune and convert it into my MP3. I could only find it on YouTube, and it wasn’t on any streaming audio service. What to do? Well, in the old days, on Android at least, there was an app called TubeMate. That, however, has now gone the way of the Dodo and you can no longer use it to convert YouTube videos and download them as MP3 audio files.
Step forward YouTubNow, a website that will easily convert YouTube to MP3. It really couldn’t be simpler to get started. You just load up their site, whack in the URL of the YouTube video you want to convert, then hit download. It’ll do the magical conversion and download the resulting MP3 to your phone, laptop or whatever device you’re browsing the YouTubNow website on. Better still, if you’ve not copied and pasted the YouTube URL, you can just whack in a search term and it’ll go off and search for the relevant YouTube video. You just need to click on the one you’d like to convert and – boom – it offers you the MP3 version.
The website states that the service is only for personal YouTube video backup, so copyright is your responsibility on this. A desktop application is also available if you’re using a PC, but we found that website worked perfectly.