I read somewhere that it is possible to rip youtube videos (music only) without the need for converting it into an mp3 as such.

The online conversion process (naturally) results in loss of quality, and (apparently) it is possible to preserve the original video's audio quality via a direct rip. If so, how would it be done and what format would it be in anyway?

thanks

  • ѕєχυαℓ ρσℓутσρє@lemmy.sdf.org
    ·
    8 months ago

    This is what I use for my personal archive:

    yt-dlp -f bestaudio/best --extract-audio --embed-metadata --embed-thumbnail --recode opus --audio-quality 0

    It does recode to opus but since the bestaudio is usually in that format already, you don't need it most of the time. You can skip the --recode opus part if you want to. I keep it because I like having a "uniform" collection. You can probably change the bestaudio/best part to simply bestaudio without losing much as well.

  • pr06lefs@lemmy.ml
    ·
    8 months ago

    I dunno about the qualilty but I do yt-dlp -x and it downloads and extracts just the audio portion.

    • infinull@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      ·
      8 months ago

      This uses ffmpeg under the hood and muxes the file into a .m4a file without transcoding. Basically keeping whatever compression youtube used for the audio (which is some sort of mpeg4 compatible audio, probably depends a little bit)

      This still recompressed, but it's the best you can do using youtube as the source.

      • uploader (almost certainly, but theoretically you could skip this step if you encoded your video well) compresses audio
      • uploader uploads to youtube
      • youtube re-compresses the audio again (almost certainly transcoding into a different codec)
  • Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee
    ·
    8 months ago

    I use this app for it. Even adds the correct artist, title, album and such to the file aswell. I tried several similar apps but this was by far the best.

  • rikonium@discuss.tchncs.de
    ·
    8 months ago

    Not a direct answer but for a while I had iTunes Match as a companion service which could be an imperfect workaround to get your hands on 256 Kbps AAC versions. (if it matches, which can’t be manually done)

    I bailed when it glitched on a couple songs and syncing broke for a while. Direct iTunes sync hasn’t let me down since but it was nice while it lasted and the Matched songs I had are still kicking.

    Of course it requires using iTunes and paying for that $25 for a non-guaranteed quality boost.

  • sho@lemmy.ml
    ·
    8 months ago

    Easiest way is to use an Indivious instance, if you are on desktop or use the Newpipe App if on Android.