There was a time when I would get very, very frustrated when it came to music. When I was younger, you needed to actually record your favorite song with a tape, and you had to be really precise to make sure you got the tracks properly. I remember all those frustrating times when I would think a song I liked came up on the radio, only to realize it either wasn’t the right song or I was too late anyway. And the radio station jingles didn’t help with the frustration either.
Thankfully, we all grew up and the geek world around us seemed very annoyed with this system too, so of course when streaming websites like YouTube came around, it was a huge relief. Then came the problem of actually keeping the tracks you liked. Converters of all kinds, even some that allows Youtube mp4, started popping up and it was really cool, except when you stumbled upon website riddled with ads that made you wonder where you had to click to avoid viruses.
The good news is that we’re now at a point where you don’t even need to go on any tools anymore. Once you’ve found the right one, you can now add a few letters to a Youtube URL and voilà, you can retrieve you file almost immediately.
People might be afraid that this would just encourage illegal activities, but when you really think about it and the wide range of content that exists on Youtube, it actually makes more sense to have a way to save rare content. Streaming platforms with paid content are good and usually function very well, but what about smaller creators or miscellaneous content that might not even see the time of day?
Content sharing and saving should be largely encouraged. It used to be about music: now it can also be about comedy, recipes, learning new skills like languages… it’s so empowering to imagine all the things you can have access to. Of course, it means you also need to be somewhere with the equipment to access said content in the first place, which is something we should also strive for.
So next time you have a nice walk planned, or a long trip, and you don’t even know if you’ll have any kind of internet access, don’t hesitate to prepare everything in advance, including saving content to your personal devices… this way, no matter where you are, you won’t be alone and you can have some quiet fun.
