Bag of Tricks

I got side tracked. Blame it on the ADHD. I was saying how tonight wasn't as unproductive as I thought because I learned 2 new tricks, but then I started talking about celeb ladies. Man, I still can't get those Brooke Burke images out of my head.

This is her when she's thinking about me:

Oh, Johnny! I want to be with you sooo bad, but I'm already accustomed to this lifestyle. Plus, you're kinda dark.

Whatever. Haha.
See... there I go again. Focus, Johnny. Phocusssss!
Okay. Phew. Ready. So here are the 2 tricks I learned tonight.


TRICK #1
Getting an MP3 version of a YouTube video
I love instrumentals. I like to freestyle when I'm alone... or drunk. The only thing is, it's pretty tough to find GOOD beats for free. I download most from DatPiff.com, but those are all mainstream and whatever beats. I need some beats that just BEG for a quality freestyle. I need some beats that underground MCs flow to. These beats, my friend, are difficult to come by. So, I was forced to listen to them off of YouTube, which is a complete hassle because unless someone has a dope ass instrumental playlist, you have to manually find a good beat every 5 minutes. And even if you do find a good playlist, there's streaming problems and copyright issues so the song either plays twice or doesn't play at all. I was listening to a dope playlist of 9th Wonder beats and thought to myself, "Damn, I gotta have these!" So I left a comment asking if anyone knew where I could get them and one dude responded by saying he just uses the Downloader. Well, I have a Mac. You know: a Mac for a Mack! Ha! I couldn't find one of those nifty YouTube Downloaders for my Mac (there's a ton for PCs if you want one, see?) So I just Googled "how do I get mp3 versions of youtube videos" and it directed me to a site called listentoyoutube.com. You just type in the URL and it converts it for you!!!
I'm always paranoid. And I'm paranoid that this thing sneaks in viruses, but... that's the point of a Mac, son!!!

TRICK #2
Downloading YouTube videos
In my search for a Mac version of the YouTube Downloader, I came across a website called macosxhints.com. That's where user marco.trive submitted this little tip:

If you're using Safari, there's an easy way to download YouTube videos. Open the page with the movie and press Command-Option-A, which shows the Activity window. If you're also loading other sites, you'll see a list of them: scroll until you find the YouTube page and click on the arrow to show details about what is being loaded. You will certainly notice an element whose size is over 0.5MB (most of the time, over 5MB). Double-click on it (even if it is still loading), and Safari will download it. When the download is over, navigate to the file in the Finder (which will probably be called get_video) and add the extension .flv to its name. Now you can play it with VLC or with QuickTime (only if you have Perian installed).

(See page here)

So that's that. 2 new tricks. I'm about to have a sick collection of instrumentals thanks to all the kind people on YouTube. Hopefully I get to them before the copyright people at Google do.