WE LIKE IT WE LOVE IT
We make the pick
Two weeks ago, my co-worker, Peter, peeked over my cubicle wall on his way out to tell me about his new tech toy - TubeSock. It's a downloadable program that eats the URLs for YouTube videos and then regurgitates them back into your iTunes, either in the form of video with audio or just audio. The next time you synch up your iPod, all that content is digested into your hand-held.

TubeSock rips YouTube video and audio to your iPod.

"Marli, you really need to check it out," Peter said, and I nodded. The new Arcade Fire album was coming out. I had e-certificates to buy for friends in other states having birthdays - too much media already on the brain. Besides, as far as my iPod is concerned, I'm not really a music video person. So I passed on TubeSock ... that is until I couldn't find three songs on iTunes that I'd heard on XM radio, read about online and also heard on inernet radio, respectively: Amy Winehouse's "Rehab," Patrick Wolfe's "Magic Position" and M.I.A's "Bird Flu." Neither of the three albums had yet been released in the States, but somehow, miraculously, there the videos for the songs were on YouTube. So, for $15, I bought the TubeSock program and was able to rip the audio from each individual video right to my iPod. The only catch - when ripping just the audio portion to your iTunes, the music is formatted in MP3, not MP4, which is inferior in sound quality. Still, if you are like me and grow angry at your inability to find a song on iTunes, you might be able to placate yourself with a ripped MP3 version, as I did, until the songs are available stateside.

If video is your thing, you'll probably be able to find older or more obscure videos from your favorite artist, or even from long-ago, one-hit wonders. Live footage also abounds. The next time you and your family take a road trip, for example, your tweenage daugther could stay preoccupied watching and re-watching on her iPod all of Sanjaya's American Idol performances to-date. Oh, what a world. - Marli Guzzetta