Well, I was at the beach, and I was in my cruising vessel, but it was in the 40s with a stiff wind blowing, so there wasn't much cruising going on. My sister and I sat inside at her beach house drinking beers and watching basketball. Oh well, a bad day at the beach is still better than a good day at the office, right?
Anyway, I've had marginal success. Hal, I'm sure there's something that I'm missing. While I don't profess to know a whole lot about computers, I am pretty sure that I'm doing it the right way. I thought I had managed to get four albums to convert to MP3 and hoped I'd be listening to them on the drive down. Nope; my ghetto blaster system in the car said no way, it was not going to play it. I looked at the file names on the converted files and despite the fact that they were supposedly converted, they still showed as MP4 files.
This got me to thinking: There must be a better way. I know that I had an app on my laptop that crashed last year that allowed me to save YouTube videos, but it offered me the option of saving just the audio or both the audio and video. These were check boxes, so there was no mention of MP3, etc. After my laptop crashed, I lost that app.
I went looking on the internet last night for it and it was nowhere. I did find however that C*Net had an article listing their top-ten pics for YouTube downloader apps. Most really didn't look like what I wanted, but one stood out. It was called 'Airy'
https://www.eltima.com/products/youtube-downloader/ that looked like what I'm looking for. It's a paid service, but only $20.00. Because it offers a 24 hour free trial, I gave it a go and it worked perfectly. Straight from the YouTube link to an MP3 (or other) file in a single operation. I tried it out and got four full albums on a thumb drive in about 15 minutes. The pros: It is super easy and inexpensive. The cons: It only offers about four MP4 versions and one MP3. It also requires a software download. That's fine for what I'm looking for, but maybe not for others. Airy makes it perfectly clear that their service is there solely for people to copy and convert their OWN material and not to bootleg protected material. If they only knew how many cassette tapes I made back in the day...
I found and tried another one tonight, called 'Easy MP3 Converter'
https://www.easymp3converter.com/v1/, which is free and does not require a download, but it is loaded with embedded pop-up ads (the kinds that ad blockers can't reach, like on Facebook). Not a big deal for what I'm doing since they're easy to skip. I converted and downloaded about 40 albums in a little over an hour directly to a USB drive. The fact that it's free and has so much junk advertising leads me to believe that it's probably something I should stay away from. Still, none of my malware or virus detection caught anything, at least for now.
Using both of these, the files on the USB drive show as MP3 and through a random sampling of media players, they all seem to play. I'm not saying that this is the definitive solution, but for $20.00, I may just go with Airy and hope for the best. The simplicity is what I was seeking, rather than having to download, convert, save and then copy the files.
I will say that one thing I noticed when using my Ford "ghetto blaster", it gives an audible warning when ANY USB drive is plugged in stating that it does not support protected material, however after waiting a few seconds, it plays them just fine. That may have been my issue all along; I was hearing that warning and just assuming that it wasn't going to play.
My quest is far from over, and I'll be sure to post back once I've figured out the best solution. As always, thank you all for your ideas and advice. I can't imagine going anywhere else when I
really need an answer.
