The real ancient trials were on the 1990s warez sites where you'd have to hunt for a 2 pixel square link on a giant page of porn ads and other trickery. Then you could get part 42 of 78 of a .rar for some game. Repeat another 77 times and wait a week for it to download on 33.6k and you got a free game!
Back when I had this problem, I got past it by hovering over the links and buttons and looking at the little url preview in the corner. The real one will either be on the same domain as the website or it will be something like gofile. The fake ones will go to domains like ads.doubleclick.net and ofksheugj.info.
Really? I haven't had any issues on the 4 devices I've tried it on (Manjaro, Android, Windows, Manjaro). And the Windows was a locked down school version.
More people need to learn about yt-dlp and ffmpeg. Can't talk about the seedy anime websites, but youtube-mp3 conversion is so easily done yourself without havaing to visit any virus-pushing sites once you figure out how.
It's a hell of a lot more convenient to go to a shady site with an adblocker installed than install/update Python and a couple command line packages before manually performing conversion yourself.
"A couple command line packages", well, since both yt-dlp and ffmpeg are command line tools and two technically qualifies as "a couple", this is technically correct, but making it seem like much more of a big deal than it is at the same time.
Also, you do not have to install Python for any of this. Never mind having Python installed is a good idea anyway.
yt-dlp has the -x option to extract the audio, and as far as I can tell it doesn't reencode which is fast. Ripping music from youtube is a single command. yt-dlp -x url
This has the same vibes as one of those commercials that tries to sell a convoluted single use kitchen tool by showing a bunch of people too disingenuously incompetent to handle the established standard, actually simple, way of doing it.
I usually use the trick to download YouTube videos using vlc media player, that gives mp4s, which one can get an mp3 from if for some reason I want an mp3 and not mp4 using audacity or something
I recently needed a QR code generated, and for the life of me, I couldn’t find a website that wouldn’t either require me to sign up, or generate the QR code to their link shortener service.
Finally resorted to logging into my headless Linux server and installing some QR code package.
The seedy anime sites are noticeably nicer than any legit site I've tried. Crunchyroll is a worse website than most pirate sites(assuming noting has improved since years ago). You just need an adblocker for the nuke my PC button next to the video.
What I hate about those is when they switch sites but leave the ad ridden husk that gets worse and I need to figure out what southeast Asian domain I need to switch my tabs to.
Another open-source tool I've been using for years is jdownloader. It surprised me multiple times by being able to more music and video websites than just YouTube https://jdownloader.org/
!!! CAREFUL WHEN DOWNLOADING AND INSTALLING JDOWNLOADER, SOME DOWNLOAD LOCATIONS INCLUDE BLOAT !!!
Jdownloader is pretty nice, but if you're not careful when downloading it you get an assful of bloat with it - enough to fuck your computer up. Check these threads:
Newpipe for Android and jdownloader on PC. Could even use vlc to find the direct download link. Never need to worry about where I'm downloading yt vids again.
What annoys me is that people are still ripping music from YouTube and putting up with shit sound quality, instead of using one of the many free resources where you can download any song you want in either 320Kbps MP3 or FLAC for free. Like this one or this one
Adblockers remove all those messages and ads. You'd be surprised at exactly how boring those pages look without 12 different download buttons, an ad for McAfee, and two banners about VPNs.
One thing I really love about seedy anime websites and YouTube mp3 converters is like. They actually do what they say they're doing. But they WILL try to trick you into downloading a virus. Like its almost just a greeting at this point. I try to extract a song from a YouTube video and it says free VPN installer tonight perhaps? Free VPN installer tonight queen? And I say YouTube-mp3 converter you sly dog, you know what I'm here for. Show me the goods. And YouTube-mp3 converter says ahhh you got me, no getting one over on you. Thought it was worth a try tho. Here you go king x
I have a little app that lets me send it a Spotify playlist and then it goes and finds the matching song on YouTube, converts it, and downloads it all in a big batch. Took forever to fuckin' find and it was of course on a site like that. Been a while since I used it; probably doesn't even work anymore. I tried like 5 others before finding that one, and they were all broken.
The dumb thing is I only wanted it because even though I use the local file thing and still pay for Spotify, it wouldn't actually play anything whenever I didn't have Internet access, making it's own built in system of "downloading" and playing files locally useless.
How reliable is the song matching on YT? I'd imagine some songs would be obscure or exclusive to Spotify so that you can't find it on YT, let alone it being a low quality one.
I'd approach this problem by using Spotify's API (or scraping) to get the good stuff, then sending it to my phone whenever I'm connected to the wifi.
YouTube ends up having more of the obscure stuff I like than Spotify does, actually so for that stuff I can't even add it to a Spotify playlist.
It's remarkably good though. I mean even if you're just putting a little vid up to show something off really quick, it can remove the audio if it picks up a track playing on the radio in the background and is usually correct in identifying the song.
I've had a good experience with youpak, you just take the url from whatever YouTube video you're on and change "tube" of YouTube.com/shegaiabfvtbrbw to "pak" so it's youpak.com/whateverwhateverwhatever and the dropdown right at the top has the download or convert to MP3 buttons right there.
I do use Firefox with an adblocker so idk if it's a cancerous site otherwise.