Remember: recording a conversation without other people’s knowledge is illegal in the UK (and elsewhere).
There’s a decent guide to setting up streaming Jitsi with YouTube already – but as I wanted to take just the audio and post it on our internal blog there were a few extra steps required that took me a little while to put together.
- Download ffmpeg command line tools.
- Download Audacity (if you think you’ll need to do some basic editing).
There are a few tools for ripping from YouTube, I use this plug-in as it does audio straight away: YouTube Video and Audio Downloader. It needs to know where ffmpeg is installed in the setting panel.
You will need to wait a few hours before you can download the audio – the video can be private, but it seems like YouTube need some time to process it first.
At this point you can use the raw file you’ve downloaded, but if you need to edit it at all you can use Audacity. First use ffmpeg to convert to a WAV file.
ffmpeg -i "downloaded audio file.m4a" newfilename.wav
Then open that in Audacity and make any changes you want to (for e.g. trimming beginning and ending of meeting). Export audio and you can save it as another WAV file. ffmpeg can then convert to whatever format you decide to use.
ffmpeg -i edited.wav finished.m4a
I actually convert to a mono recording in Audacity as well then you can make the target file smaller using ffmpeg commands like:
ffmpeg -i edited.wav -b:a 64k finished.m4a
There are good instructions for encoding as MP3 and AAC (which is the .m4a codec) on the ffmpeg website.