YouTube to chords
EarChord does not download YouTube audio, and that is a deliberate choice. Here is what it does instead, and how to get the chords of a video today.
Reading a video as it plays is what the browser extension does:chord finder chrome extension
Why we do not fetch the audio for you
Every site that turns a pasted YouTube link into a chord chart is downloading that audio on a server. That means bandwidth costs, which is exactly the thing that forces free tools into daily limits, and it means acting on video you have no rights to. EarChord runs entirely in your browser precisely so it can stay free and unlimited, and pulling video server-side would undo both halves of that.
The honest version of this feature belongs in the browser, on the page where the video is already playing and already decoded. That is what the EarChord extension will do: read the audio the player is already producing, without downloading anything.
What works right now
If you have the track as a file, use the analyser on this page and you get the full result immediately.
If you only have the video, the browser extension is the path. It taps the audio the YouTube player is already playing and shows a chord ribbon under it, with a link back here for the full timeline. It is not released yet; the analyser here works today.
Questions
- Can I paste a YouTube link?
- Not here. A link on its own gives us no audio, and fetching it on a server is the thing that turns free tools into limited ones. The extension solves this properly by reading audio that is already playing on your machine.
- Is that legal to do in a browser?
- Reading audio your own browser is already playing is a normal Web Audio capability and involves no download. What we avoid is server-side retrieval of media we have no rights to.