this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023

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Is it possible to rip audio from youtube without loss of quality or online conversions? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does it skip the recode completely if the format is already opus?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Yes, it does. It just repackages it from .m4a to .opus without re-encoding the actual audio stream.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

YouTube compresses the video as soon as it's uploaded, so it's unlikely you can obtain any sort of lossless download. You may be able to get a .wav or similar download of a video's audio track, but there will still be compression losses from the YouTube side.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year 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)

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

yt-dlp has the -F parameter to list the available stream formats. (uppercase F to list, lowercase f to select)

I use -f 251 to download the opus audio stream, and afterwards use ffmpeg -i file -c copy file.opus to copy the opus audio stream in an opus file format file (codec copy so without encoding losses).

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

If you want an online tool, cobalt.tools can rip the original youtube audio if you choose "best" format in settings -> 🎶. It's also FOSS with no tracker/ad garbage so I can recommend it as an alternative for yt-dlp which has been mentioned already.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I believe Jdownloader 2 lets you do link grabber with YouTube links that can download audio only with a choice of format.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Get yt-dlp then run: yt-dlp -x 'video-url'

I believe if you're willing to check the format codes on the video you can download audio only but both will get you the least compressed audio available.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

+1 for MediaHuman, if you're wanting a GUI. Super simple and powerful. It's paid software but there are cracks around.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not paid though?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the YouTube Downloader is paid and they might be getting it confused.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Oh I'm four days late but yes. The YouTube downloader also downloads audio, I didn't realize they had a separate program that only downloads audio. Weird.

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

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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.