I've been using Clipgrab (macOS) to download music (mp3s) from YouTube. I've seen some mentions that the quality (real bitrate as opposed to what the file states) is bad to begin with on YouTube and that downloaders might make it worse. How bad is the quality of what I'm downloading? Any better downloaders or does the quality suck to begin with?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Please somebody correct me if I'm wrong:

Separate audio is rarely available on streaming sites like YouTube, so if you're ripping a song from it, you essentially are transcoding the files three times:

Encoding by the content creator
Extracting the audio from the the content
Encoding in the format of choice

So no matter how great the quality is at either of these transcoding ends, you are still transcoding in lossy format at least two times

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

yt-dlp can just download the audio. It usually comes down in m4a at quality that I would describe as "very listenable". So only the first of those three steps are mandatory if you do it that way.

yt-dlp -x <url>

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

But is the source separate on YT's server is what I'm wondering.

If not, there's a transcoding stage

[+] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

It varies based on the age of the video, newer ones do indeed have separate audio downloads. You can force audio only with

yt-dlp -f bestaudio

This will cause the script to only consider audio-only formats, if bandwidth is a concern. However, how it decides which one is "best" is beyond me. For example, I tried one video and got a webm that contains only an audio track:

~ $ yt-dlp -f bestaudio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
[youtube] Extracting URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
[youtube] dQw4w9WgXcQ: Downloading webpage
[youtube] dQw4w9WgXcQ: Downloading ios player API JSON
[youtube] dQw4w9WgXcQ: Downloading android player API JSON
[youtube] dQw4w9WgXcQ: Downloading m3u8 information
[info] dQw4w9WgXcQ: Downloading 1 format(s): 251
[download] Destination: /data/data/com.termux/files/home/storage/movies/ytdl/20091025__Rick_Astley_-_Never_Gonna_Give_You_Up_Official_Music_Video.webm
[download] 100% of    3.28MiB in 00:00:00 at 6.91MiB/s

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Yes, I deleted my comment after I checked the command line I was using and testing it out. The CPU usage was because I was using the --audio-format flag with something other than m4a/opus or whatever it is that youtube uses natively. And the file I saw on disk was not the video, it was the audio file in youtube's native format.

For reference, I'm using $ytdl -f "bestaudio/best" -ciw -o "$audioroot/%(title)s (%(upload_date>%Y-%m-%d)s).%(ext)s" --extract-audio --audio-quality 0 --audio-format mp3 "$vidurl".

[–] TableteKarcioji 2 points 2 years ago

I haven't seen a YouTube video without a separate audio track. If you use yt-dlp just add -F and the URL to get all available download options/formats. Then use -f and the number of the download option and URL to download the video/audio. Audio on YouTube is available in two formats most of the time: opus and m4a.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

YouTube audio quality isn't amazing, but it's not that bad if you get the right format. Using yt-dlp, you can get opus audio that sounds way better than mp3. Example: yt-dlp -f 251 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

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