JDownloader 2 works best for me

 

yt-dlp is best for me

 

JDownloader is great but this tool is worth Checking out.
Records all MIDI & AUDIO on your Mac and is easily draggable directly into your DAW.

https://www.monkeyc.audio

 

I was just thinking about this very question. This thread is a couple of years old and these things seem to change almost weekly with sites shutting, going paid, new sites etc. I have never tried ripping any audio only from Youtube before, only full videos and usually in 720p format.

So I guess ideally it would not be a download .exe program with a massive "how to" learning curve, but rather an online free tool to simply download the original audio format (not a 16bit/44khz WAV conversion of a 128kbps mp3, which does nothing but waste storage space). Most of these downloaders don't specify whether or not they detect the true original file format or just download whatever is user selected when downloading the URL.. it'd be nice to know what the original file format is on Youtube beforehand so I can select the same quality download.

A search yields so many results, many of which are bait and switch paid BS.

I mainly want to rip a dozen or so old songs in the best original quality available. Given the above, which ones do you guys currently suggest?

 

tons of online links that you paste the address and choose between video audio etc, just google

 

So lets say I select 1080p HD playback quality on Youtube, what is the audio quality going to be?

Is there a handy chart anywhere showing what each video playback quality translates to in audio MP3, WAV etc ?

 

youtubepp <--

 

On site itself it's basically "worse the video, better the audio". Iirc 128 kbps is used on 360p or 480p, can't recall now, and it drops with higher video qualities.

 

YouTube serves the highest audio quality it supports by default on PC/Android. If you're not otherwise limited by bandwidth, that's Opus at 128kbit/s (format 251) for all video quality settings all the way from 8K down to 240p. At 144p, they serve Opus at 64kbit/s (format 250).

On iOS you get served AAC (at least on the web version and old iPhones), which is somewhat worse.

To manually check: Right click the video and enable 'Stats for nerds'.



Codec line tells you the format YouTube serves you (VP9 video with Opus audio in this case).

A downloader like YouTube-DLP will let you pick the format.

 

FWIW, Jdownloader2 internally uses a port of yt-dl (I don't know if switched to yt-dlp) and shows the quality, format and so on choices in a nice GUI.

My point being: yt-dlp is the most powerful tool, period. But it's command line and extremely complex to set up due to hundreds of settings.
Although JDownloader isn't the easiest app is still light-years easier than yt-dlp

 

jdownloader

 

This...although now I just sample into my Sp-404 mkii or MPC Live II Retro

 

Jdownloader, possible to let it run in the background while ripping a whole channel...

 

Soundloader, it has bunch of other rippers for other sites too! Like spotify, automatically sets an album image and stuff too

 

jdownloader

 

An interesting codec comparison:
See how above 128kb they mostly align.

Codec Landscape graphs

That's why Jdownloader is useful: it shows the available real embedded streams.

I personally choose AAC, for compatibility reasons.

 

yesterday, opened S1, loopback, record, eq, limiter, render, this is my method!

 

4k video downloader