MP3 Rocket

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on October 14, 2012

YouTube hosts millions of free videos, including tons of tunes; so much that it's sometimes easier to download and save your favorites. You have many choices when it comes to free tools that can do the job. One of the best we've seen is MP3 Rocket, a tool that can search for, find, download, convert, and save video and music files from YouTube. It handles most video formats, including HD, and audio formats, too. It also shows online TV programming, plays 'Net radio, and even accesses lots of games.

MP3 Rocket's tabbed interface involves an integrated media player along with social media links in its bottom panel and a menu bar accessing the usual controls and options as well as Skins, Chat, and Tools. The main view is tabbed for Music, Video, Convert, My Files, Watch TV, Radio, and Games. The first tab, Music, shows two fields, a Search field labeled Music and another labeled Video to MP3 Converter where you can directly enter video URLs.

We typed in a search guaranteed to turn up a specific tune, and MP3 Rocket opened a new tab with our search results ranked by Popularity and displaying Time, Format, and other data in a list view. MP3 Rocket turned up page after page of results. While only a few were specific, we like seeing the near misses listed, too, since sometimes interesting things turn up. Clicking Download MP3 produced a download dialog that let us set a destination folder, audio format, and bit rate, and even copy the data to iTunes. The dialog also displays any associated image file and enables tag data editing. When everything was set, we clicked OK, and MP3 Rocket displayed our tune in its download queue, from which you can also preview and download files directly. Our song downloaded very quickly and played normally. The Video and Converter tabs offered similar functionality, and the TV, Radio, and Game extras are nice to have.

While MP3 Rocket's extras certainly add to its appeal, doing a quick, easy, and accurate job of grabbing and converting YouTube audio and video is its forte. Put MP3 Rocket on your short list of YouTube downloaders.