Ripping

Ethical Consideration

I know, it’s 2023 2025, and ripping continues to be “not a cool thing” to do. That said, sometimes you need to rip something from another source program for sampling or auditing purposes or your client is being annoying about giving you exports and you needed the assets yesterday. There are definitely ethical reasons you may need to rip audio and video, so here’s my write up and suggestions.

Audio Ripping

I recommend Audio HiJack, it allows you to rip audio from a specific application (or system wide), and you can set rules to “start a new file after .5 seconds of silence,” for example. 

If you can’t rip internally for some reason, you can do the old play from one source, record on another device trick. Another computer. A Zoom H5. Whatever. 

If you want to automatically name audio tracks, use MusicBrainz. This application goes through your file and checks it against a massive online library. It will automatically name if it’s a clear winner. If there are options, it will give you a choice. It’s using the same technology iTunes used when you went to rip a CD into Mp3s in 2002. 

Video Ripping

You used to be able to just screen record, but you can’t anymore. Workarounds include installing NDi or Spout/Syphon tools that allow you to send from a browser window, then you can just record that NDi or Spout/Syphon stream. 

If you can’t do that, or the frame rate is trash, you’ll need to use a capture card on a secondary device - where you output a computer’s video and input it to a capture card on another computer or recording device. Black Magic recorder is a good example. 

If you can’t do that, get a nice and clean matte screen that is high resolution, set up a tripod, match the frame rate (ish) and match the refresh rate with your shutter speed and shutter angle. 

For ripping something like youtube, you can always dig around for gross downloaders, but search no further than Youtube-DL which allows you to download (some) Youtube URLs. There is a bit of a learning curve and you have to do it through terminal, but if you are familiar with a tool like FFMPEG, this will feel easy for ya. 

Youtube-DL & Cheat Sheet

Youtube-DL doesn’t always work and is sometimes left for periods of time where it’s not updated, check out other versions – like ytdl-org

yt-dlp uses the same syntax as youtube-dl

Installing yt-dlp via homebrow

brew install --formula yt-dlp

Using ytdl, here's a sample syntax to download the best available MP4

yt-dlp -f mp4 'url'