There are those days when you want to listen to a certain song, but either don’t own a copy of the song, or just don’t have your iPod on you. Thankfully, users on YouTube are usually kind enough to share their collection with us via videos featuring static images with said music over top. The only drawback to this method is portability. What if you want to take that song with you? If you don’t own an iPhone, how else are you going to get that music on the go?

Fortunately, the creative minds of the internet have come together to help us out.

The service we are going to use is called VidtoMP3. What this website does is take video links that you supply it with, converts them to MP3, and spits it back out for your enjoyment. It’s a pretty good service, considering it’s free.

Another one you can use is Media Converter. It does the same thing as VidtoMP3 does, but better. It has support for a wide variety of formats, including .avi .ogg .xls… (Don’t ask me how it converts to .xls, I haven’t tried it.) The only downside of this program is that it limits your downloads to 100MB, unless you upgrade to premium.

The most useful aspect of these programs is the fact it is an indirect way of getting around a firewall, or block list, to listen to a Youtube video. You just search what music you want on Google. After the Youtube, Google merger, Google integrated Youtube into its search engine, and when you search for youtube on Google, you get a lovely Google-sponsored search on youtube which gives results in the Google namespace.

This convenient search completely circumvents any blocks of youtube. To download the music, just copy the link location from Google, and paste it into the downloader of your choice.

If your downloader of choice was Mediaconverter, just convert the file to a .avi to watch. And Viola! Youtube glory from behind the firewall/on your preferred music listening device.