If you can’t find a WAV file for the song you want to use as your reference track try Youtube to WAV conversion:
https://www.onlinevideoconverter.com/video-converter
You can either save the song as a WAV or MP3. This tool works with most YouTube videos, but not all.
Comment below and let me know what you think… did you try it, did you like it?
I have not tried it but you will never get WAV quality, since when a file is compressed to a lossy format you can never restore that lost fidelity. This is also transcoding, which I have never liked the sound of but if it is not for critical listening applications fair enough.
Hi Paul, when I create a music video and set the output format to not compress the WAV file - shouldn’t that make the audio uncompressed?
No. Once audio, (or any kind of media), has been compressed (i.e looped off) to a lesser quality format the information is gone forever.
You can go from high quality to low all day long because you’re making copies from the original and throwing information away… But not reverse…
Think of this… Perhaps you have some obscure VHS cassette from the early 80s you love -
Would you burn it to DVD and expect the DVD version to look better than the VHS you copied it from?
Of corse not… It’s no different than copying a cassette to CD…
You can losslessly clone from VHS to DVD fine; but you can’t improve quality by cloning a VHS to a DVD.
The same reason why a black and white film from the 20s doesn’t look like Rogue One simply because they made a digital copy… (Thank god! There’s so much soul in those grainy black and white imperfections…) The copy’s as good, but never better than the source…
Hope that helps clarify…
Hi, when you output video from per example “Vegas Pro” or other high-end video editing software you can choose NOT to compress the audio. I believe all High-Def videos done by the stars have the audio in High Def quality, not compressed how you describe it. Of course, if you use “presets” in your video editing software the audio will be compressed. I don’t think that’s what the pros do… Just my thoughts on this…
You are correct. From OUR end you can tell it not to compress but once it gets to YouTube THEY compress the video and thus the audio. It has nothing to do with what we are doing on our end. It is what they are doing on their end. No matter what you upload it is compressed and distributed to servers acorss the world.
Thanks for this information. It is very helpful for me. I also use a free YouTube to WAV converter. It works well for me. Give it a try.
I use a different solution and it works for me well. If you plug your iPhone via the cable to the Mac. You can use it as a sound source.
Then I use my DAW to record a playing track from iPhone. I use Apple Music to get the song I want.
I hope there’s a similar solution for Android phones as well. Also, there are softwares like Loopback where you can record the computer audio. (In this case, you can use Youtube, iTunes, etc)
Last time when I want to save audio of a youtube clip to wav but it failed to be analyzed by such online video converter, i use recmaster recorder to capture it as high-quality WAV…