YouTube as a source of unique new music recordings

YouTube has become a valuable source of historic recordings. There are several channels that are worthwhile checking out. If you combine them with a YouTube-to-MP3 conversion site, you can burn your own CDs, with pretty decent 128 kbps sound quality.

Here are some channels:

• http://www.youtube.com/user/WatchBlueSkies: uploads from East German LPs from the 60s through 80s, not re-isseud on CD mostly. Music by e.g. Ernst Hermann Meyer, Christfried Schmidt, Paul-Heinz Dittrich, Guenter Kochan, Siegfried Koehler, Johann Cilensek, Rudolf Wagner-Regeny, Gerhard Rosenfeld, Joerg Herchet, and many others.
• http://www.youtube.com/user/TheWelleszCompany: miscellaneous 20th and 21st century music.
• http://www.youtube.com/user/stanchinsky: same
• http://www.youtube.com/user/ch252525: same
• http://www.youtube.com/user/NewMusicXX: same
• http://www.youtube.com/user/ViewerNotes: same

For the conversion to MP3, you can use different sites, such as:

• http://www.youtube-mp3.org/: maximum length 20 minutes
• http://www.vidtomp3.com/index.php: make sure you set it to 'High Quality'
• http://www.video2mp3.net/: sometimes offers 256 kbps rates

All that's left to do, is burn to a CD using Windows Media Player, which will automatically convert MP3 to the standard CD format.