Taking YouTube Audio from Mono to Stereo

You might not know this, but YouTube audio is mono. Of course, many of us never noticed because I guess we were so thrilled to see and hear our favorite bands again. So then I wondered how to pull the audio stream out of the video, and I found several other people wondered that too and built scripts, websites, programs, or browser plugins to handle that.

That's fine and all, but then you're stuck with a mono MP3 file that sounds interesting but not quite there on your iPod. Wouldn't it be nice to convert that from mono into simulated stereo? And what if that simulated stereo was pretty darn good? Oddly, this seems to be a concept that not many people have tackled. So, combining some techniques, I figured it out. However, you're going to need to install Linux on a PC for it. This kind of cutting edge stuff isn't going to be on Windows Vista, and if it were, DRM would "call home" on you about it.

In general, there are 3 workhorse command line tools that are used. Wget -- this is used to get the file from the website. Ffmpeg -- this is used to pull out the audio. Ecasound -- this is used to simulate the stereo from a mono file. And when I say simulate stereo, I mean that it's pretty darn good. It's more than just splitting the sound into two separate channels. It splits it, shifts one channel, and does an ever-so-slight EQ change in each ear. It makes the YouTube audio sound fantastic.

So here's the Bash script to make it all come true for you on Linux. Sorry I haven't built a PyGTK GUI for it -- I don't have the time right now, but perhaps someone else has this time. This script prompts you for the URL path and this is all of the URL including the

?v=

part but not the

&

and beyond. Then, it asks you for the filename (except it doesn't need the file extension). After about 1.25 minutes, it drops a simulated stereo MP3 file in your home directory in an "mp3" folder.

Enjoy!

#!/bin/bash
bu="http://youtube.com/get_video.php?"
mkdir -p ~/mp3
cd ~/mp3
read -p "YouTube url? " ur
read -p "Name? " nv
echo;echo;
wget ${ur} -O /tmp/y1
uf=${bu}`grep player2.swf /tmp/y1 | cut -d? -f2 | cut -d\" -f1`
wget "${uf}" -O /tmp/y.flv
ffmpeg -i /tmp/y.flv -f mp3 -vn -acodec copy "/tmp/${nv}.mp3"
ecasound -i "/tmp/${nv}.mp3" -etf:8 -o "${nv}.mp3"
echo;echo;
rm -f "/tmp/${nv}.mp3"
echo "File is saved in your home directory in the 'mp3' folder. Press Enter to exit."
read