[SOLVED] How do you download Youtube audio with highest quality?

Ganesh Venugopal@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 60 points –

edit: Guys, I now yt-dlp is the way to go, but is there a gui front end for yt-dlp with all the options that I get on cli? Or else, just advice me on how to use the yt-dlp cli

I need the best audio-quality and I want it to be webm and want it to be downloaded with transcripts too, so what should I do?

I tried this snap video-downloader and it was able to download a webm file and it's amazing. I love it. But, I am not sure if it's the best quality I can get. I was wondering what Linux native software you used to download Youtube audio in it's best quality.

btw, when I downloaded the .webm file, I got it along with the transcribed text and it plays in the place where video subs play and it's quite nice.

Something else

https://www.makeuseof.com/download-youtube-videos-yt-dlp-linux-terminal/

Removes all sponsors and downloads the best audio into Videos/yt-dlp

cd Videos/yt-dlp &* youtube-dlp yt-dlp -x --audio-quality=0 --sponsorblock-mark all --sponsorblock-remove all [YOUTUBE-URL] && cd ~

sudo snap video-downloader

Video-downloader snap downloads the package Video-Downloader and this can be opened through terminal (you can create a .desktop file through menulibre for this) And all videos with varying degree of quality can be downloaded here. But, this doesn't include sponsorblocks so idk, use yt-dlp here too, but I don't download videos so I don't really care for this.

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Another vote for yt-dlp

It works with ffmpeg and you can choose the quality you want to download from Youtube. Also its nice if you want to record a livestream as its being broadcast. Its also not limited to just Youtube either, it seems to work on lots of sites.

4 more...

Compare with yt-dlp from GitHub. It works from the command line and you can control the quality level you want.

thank you I will give it a go

edit: I need a gui which has all the features of the yt-dlp cli but is easier to understand, does this give you any ideas?

I suggest Parabolic, it's very feature rich, but I don't think you'll ever find a frontend with all options, as the devs need to catch up, design and also consider which are important and leave others out, so they don't bloat the interface making it impossible to parse. At most you'll get an option to create shortcuts for custom commands (YTDLnis does this on Android).

Anyway, regardless of the application, I think you'd get the same quality, both should try to get the best available by default

I also made a small list some time ago https://codeberg.org/quazar-omega/awesome-yt-dlp if you want to help add more apps.

I use jdownloader2. Mostly because I never learned to use yt-dlp.

I use YouTube links which gives you direct links to the media. It's a userscript so you'll need the ability to run those. Also it doesn't seem to play nicely with premium, but that's easily worked around by letting it run in incognito tabs. Even with the quirks it's way better than any middleman download site.

I also have yt-dlp which is also awesome, but works differently. I do use both depending on what I'm trying to accomplish.. for a single audio or video file YouTube Links is more convenient, for anything more than that yt-dlp is the way to go.

Well there is clipgrab if you want a GUI downloader.

thank you but imma stick with yt-dlp for a while now, I am looking for a gui with it in the backend now

I just used chat gpt to teach me the basics of yt-dlp. Worked great! Can do it with other programs too

140 is always the best quality, except when it has a number tacked on for randomly ordered alternate languages.

youtube-dl is pretty much the gold standard for all things YouTube downloading.

Not for a while. yt-dl is outdated. yt-dlp is the modern one you should be using.

it doesn't work for me and the devs basically have given up on a very common error.