I cannot believe how utterly fucked-up software has become. I wanted to grab a snippet of video on YouTube, and after hours of screwing around with different software packages, I have completely failed. Ten years ago, this task was trivially easy to do, but nowadays software has become so powerful that such a task has become impossible.
I began using QuickTime, Apple’s video tool. I set it to capture video on my screen. Then I played the YouTube video. It grabbed the video just fine, but it go the audio through the built-in microphone, which used the sound from the room for input. This produced lousy distorted audio. I wanted the audio from YouTube to go straight into the recording of the video. No such luck.
Many years ago, there was a solution to this called “Soundflower”. I searched and discovered that it is still available, and several people claim that it works fine on the latest Mac operating system. I was suspicious, because SoundFlower hasn’t been revised for many years, but I decided to give it a try. I downloaded and installed it, and set it to be the audio input source. No luck; it didn’t work. I wasn’t surprised, so I moved on to something else.
Of course, one would think that Apple would have figured out that people want to do this, but that’s asking too much of Apple. In their defense, perhaps they do this to prevent people from pirating movies they watch on the web.
My next effort used Movavi, an application that handles lots of video tasks. I downloaded and installed it, then ran it. But no! The trial version doesn’t record audio. To find out if it records audio properly, I have to pay for the full version. I’m not going to trust any company that refuses to let me find out if their stuff works.
Moving on, my next effort was MacX YouTube Downloader. I downloaded and installed it, then ran it. Everything worked perfectly, right up to the point where I wanted to get the downloaded video file. Here’s a screenshot:
This shows the window for MacX YouTube downloader. I have placed over it a window from the Finder; I’ll explain that later. The MacX YouTube downloader shows that I downloaded my desired YouTube video twice. Over in the column on the right, it shows the “Output Folder” to be “/Users/chriscrawford/Movies/Mac Video Library”
OK, so all I have to do is go look inside that folder for my downloaded video, right? Wrong! The Finder window entitled “Movies” shows that there is NO folder inside the Movies folder called Mac Video Library. It doesn’t exist! So, MacX YouTube Downloader is another useless piece of software.
Moving on
I decided to go ahead and purchase Airy; after all, it’s only $19.95. So I went to their website to order the software. They of course had to try to sneak in an extra purchase, padding my order by another $19.95. I was able to figure out their little trick and disable it, but I really shouldn’t have to protect myself from dirty tricks like this. Don’t trust software companies!
So I placed my order and they forwarded me to PayPal to send the money. I logged into PayPal and PayPal sent a numeric code to my telephone to confirm. I checked my phone and nothing arrived. I waited. Still nothing. Then I looked more closely at my phone and discovered that it had no cellphone connection. Why? I have no idea. It has been working just fine for months, but now it decided to drop offline. So I reset the network settings. And waited some more while it went through the reset process. And it STILL has no cellphone connection. Fuck it. At this point, what I’d like to do is get an AK-47 with several thousand rounds of ammo and storm into one of these software developers, shooting everybody. I’d want to record the massacre on video, too. But I know that, if I tried, there would probably be a bug or a user interface problem that would ruin it. So I’m just giving up in utter defeat.