Blast From The Past

Marc-André Hamelin composed a classical rendition of Nokia's orignal iconic ringtone. I had a Nokia phone for many years and Trigger Happy TV's Nokia sketchs always crack me up.

I've switched from my corporate Blackberry to my shiny new Nexus One and haven't done much in the way of changing the default sounds. This seemed like an excellent opportunity.

I found all sorts of conflicting and useless advice on how to take the audio of a Youtube video (flv format) and save it as an mp3.

Turns out it's really easy.

  1. Download the video (I used youtube-dl)
  2. Install ffmpeg (sudo aptitude install ffmpeg)
  3. ffmpeg -i downloaded-video.flv -acodec copy audio.mp3

et voila

no need to transcode or mess with flags or anything.

Who wants to start a betting pool on how long it takes someone to strangle me for my annoying ringtone?