Rated 3 out of 5 stars

don't get me wrong, this is a great add-on and everything, and works as advertised, but it seems a little too good to be true... how does it actually work? it is the only add-on I have managed to find that successfully downloads youtube videos as mp3s without using a converter website. is this legal? safe?

This review is for a previous version of the add-on (2.8.1.1-signed). 

Hi, it's (relatively) simple, at least from a workflow standpoint. Links to the video are on the youtube page. Youtube MP3 Podcaster downloads them using the link and then uses 3 programs to make the MP3: ffmpeg.exe makes the MP3, MP3gain.exe fixes the volume and finally encTagger.exe adds the tags. Of the 3 only encTagger.exe is written by me. It's actually a really, really simple program. It uses two programming libraries (taglib and poco) to do that tagging. taglib does the actual tagging, poco is there to work around the Windows command line not having unicode support (I pass the tags through on command line). Think accented characters and Asian languages. This makes it 'self contained' in the sense that all the work done to download/make the MP3 is done on your computer. I use the plugin to download freely available podcasts and other creative commons licensed works.