TuneTune – YouTube To MP3 Converter Browser Add-on

St. Patrick’s Day is over for another year – and, thank goodness for that. Along with New Years Eve, St. Paddy’s Day, it seems to me, brings out the worst in the non-drinking drinkers who load-up well past their capacity to handle the juice of the barley. As an Irishman (of some renown   ), I do celebrate St. Patrick’s Day – but, in comfort – at home – with good friends – and, a boatload of Guinness.

Traditional Irish music, along with good craic (conversation), plays an essential role in properly celebrating Ireland’s patron saint. So, this year, as in previous years, I turned to YouTube audio ripping to augment my collection of  traditional Irish music (no, not Danny Boy, When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, or the like).

Ripping music from YouTube videos is a quarrelsome question. There are those who consider anything downloaded for personal use to be legal. There are those who consider downloading anything that is copyrighted to be illegal – under any circumstances.

The YouTube audio ripping situation presents a different set of legal issues though, it seems to me. I’m not sure I see the difference between saving a YouTube video to disk (which loads of people do), for later playback – and, simply ripping the audio portion for later playback.

There are any number of ways to extract audio from YouTube videos, but many are cumbersome and time consuming. There is a solution thought, that’s neither cumbersome, or  time consuming – TuneTune, a freeware YouTube to MP3 converter. Once this browser add-on is configured, it’s one click simple – more or less.

Following installation, the add-on will append an icon to the toolbar or status bar. This icon will go from gray to color (as shown in the following screen captures), when you’re visiting a YouTube page.

Non YouTube page:

YouTube page:

Clicking on the icon will convert the video from YouTube, to MP3, in one click.

Additional choices are available in the options menu – as shown below.

Here’s a quick walkthrough which will illustrate how quick and convenient this browser add-0n is.

First up – a visit to a YouTube page hosting the Neil Diamond tune – “Hello Again.”

Since I obviously have the add-on installed, you’ll notice the TuneTune icon displayed (in the screen capture above), directly on the YouTube page. A simple click on the icon begins the conversion process – as shown below. BTW, pasting the YouTube link is not necessary.

Following the file conversion, users have the opportunity to customize the converted file, in a limited way – as shown below.

The following screen shot shows the converted file in the directory which I created specifically for this test.

Elapsed time (clicking on the icon to file download completion) – under 15 seconds. That’s fast!

Supported browsers:

TuneTune is available in multiple languages. The current language is changeable by clicking on your language of choice in the footer.

Visit the author’s site – here (TuneTune.net).

Find And Share Meaningful Comparisons With Mokabla

Guest writer Akshay Arabolu gives you the lowdown on his startup Internet service Mokabla, which aims to provide users with meaningful comparisons for any topic on the web.

We suffer from information overload. I quote Eric Schmidt, Google’s ex-CEO, “Every two days, we now create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003”. That’s a lot of data! (around five exabytes to be exact).

So with all this information floating around, it becomes imperative that we find better ways to search. Mokabla was created with the aim of helping users effectively navigate one corner of this information jungle – that of comparison searches.

We have all looked for product/service comparisons. In a lot of instances, we are looking for first-hand comparisons from a user’s perspective. Comparisons provided by people who have experience or expertise in that subject; the kind of information that will help us understand the difference between two products quickly and easily, and allow for effective decision making.

For example if you are trying to compare email marketing platforms like MailChimp and ConstantContact, or optimization tools like Optimizely and Google Website Optimizer, you want to hear opinions from people who have used the services before. Think Amazonreviews – the first thing we do when we click on a product in Amazon is read the user reviews.

Mokabla has been designed so that when people look for comparisons, they don’t have to sift through various sites, blogs, forums etc to extract the relevant information. You will be able to find meaningful side by side/apples to apples comparisons from people who have knowledge and experience in exactly those subjects. Multiple people can create comparisons on the same topics so users get different perspectives, users can also rate, comment on and ask for comparisons.

Since there is no real precedent for a product such as Mokabla, I wanted to briefly discuss the space that Mokabla is in. Mokabla lives in the nascent but rapidly growing “Online Knowledge Market” space. This sector comprises of Q&A sties, such as Quora (considered as the “next big thing”), and the hugely popular programming Q&A site, StackOverflow.

For finding answers to specific questions, these sites can be a far better alternative to Google. Why (Disclaimer: some of these are from Quora & StackExchange). Simple, a lot of times:

• The question can’t be answered by a simple search because it requires specialist subject-matter expertise.
• It requires extensive research and synthesis of multiple sources – i.e. reading and culling information from various sites.

• The question requires the answer to combine a considerable amount of human judgment with facts, as opposed to an answer brought to you by SEO – possibly a link from a company that’s trying to sell you something.
• The question has multi-definition words where the nuance would be best understood by a person.
• And lastly, Google helps us find information but information does not mean answers. These types of sites help us find answers.

Currently trending comparison sites such as Kevin O’Connor’s Find The Best, the Google acquired Beat That Quote, and the recently named #1 VC  backed company by the WSJ, Castlight Health, are all objective, data-driven sites which pull information from across the web. While this is definitely required information, there are a lot of comparisons which need a human hand, Mokabla was designed to fill this void.

Akshay’s Bio: Previously, Akshay used to work as an Investment Banker in the software sector. In that avatar, while helping entrepreneurs with the sales of their companies, he got hooked onto the idea entrepreneurship. When his tenure as a banker ended, he started to work on his own venture. While researching different software and applications for his startup, he found that it was not easy to find side by side comparisons for all these various entities; he subsequently launched Mokabla to solve that problem.

To find out how Mokabla got started and what’s happening behind the scenes, read Akshay’s blog – How to Launch a Startup

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You Can Be A Computer Detective Too, With OSForensics Beta

The CSI TV franchise is great entertainment – but that’s what it is – entertainment. Nevertheless, the investigative techniques, despite the fact they are, in the main, pure science fiction – are pretty convincing.

One area where television productions, like this, and movies for that matter, generally get it right is – computer forensic investigation. While this type of investigation, with the investigators fingers flying across the keyboard, appears to be complex, in fact – the process is generally driven by software that is well organized, and logically constructed.

If you would like to try your hand at being a computer “Sherlock Holmes”, then checkout OSForensics Beta (latest release February 4, 2011), a menu driven forensic application that will allow you to identify, extract, document, and interpret data, on your computer.

The GUI is laid out in a functional and logical step by step process – easy to understand and navigate.

I won’t cover all of the capabilities of OSForensics ( I don’t want to spoil all your investigative fun), but as an example, the application can scan a system for evidence of recent activity, including accessed websites, USB drives, wireless networks, recent downloads, website logins and website passwords.

Just one example – in the screen shot below, you can see that the application has captured my login password (blacked out for privacy), for my Hotmail account.

The deleted file recovery function is particularly powerful and the application provides a graphical view of the allocation of the deleted file clusters on the physical disk.

Fast facts:

Search for Emails – An additional feature of being able to search within files is the ability to search email archives. The indexing process can open and read most popular email file formats (including pst) and identify the individual messages.

Recover Deleted Files – After a file has been deleted, even once removed from the recycling bin, it often still exists until another new file takes its place on the hard drive. OSForensics can track down this ghost file data and attempt to restore it back to useable state on the hard drive.

Uncover Recent Activity – Find out what users have been up to. OSForensics can uncover the user actions performed recently on the system, including but not limited to:

Opened Documents

Web Browsing History

Connected USB Devices

Connected Network Shares

Collect System Information – Find out what’s inside the computer. Detailed information about the hardware a system is running on:

CPU type and number of CPUs

Amount and type of RAM

Installed Hard Drives

Connected USB devices, and much more.

View Active Memory – Look directly at what is currently in the systems main memory. Attempt to uncover passwords and other sensitive information that would otherwise be inaccessible. Select from a list of active processes on the system to inspect. OSF can also dump their memory to a file on disk for later inspection.

Extract Logins and Passwords – Recover usernames and passwords from recently accessed websites in common web browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Opera.

While the application is designed as a forensic recovery tool, I can think of a number of uses for this application (since it can be run from USB drive), over and above its expressed purpose. I’m sure you can too.

System requirements: Windows XP, Vista, Win 7, Server 2000, 2003, 2008 (32bit and 64bit support – 64bit recommended). Minimum 1GB of RAM. (4GB+ recommended), 30MB of free disk space – can be run from USB drive.

Download the beta at: PassMark Software

There are a number of worthwhile additional free tools which can be used in conjunction with OSForensics. Checkout the developer’s site here.

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