I guess they must be lying or it needs to meet very specific criteria that no one really knows, because the way modern YouTube works is by giving you audio and video separately (that way the save up space and bandwidth by only having to adjust video quality). The list I posted has every format available, including premium and it has no audio improvements, since premium resolution is video-only... Weird that they would advertise a lie, if that's the case. Maybe it's only for YouTube Music uploads, since those get reflected back into normal YouTube as well.

m4a is still the default because they can't serve vp9 video for every device (needs decoding capabilities for that), so it's going to always come up first. I suggest using yt-dlp and parsing "-f 251" for opus audio. Jdownloader might probably use it internally, and if it's outdated, sometimes you might have trouble getting some formats because of that.

That's exactly what my father does, I went as far as teaching him yt-dlp via command line because he was more willing to do that than learning to use SoulSeek.

 

Not really sure what you're getting at there. I dont use FLAC as a stop gap between MP3. FLAC is used on the original material INSTEAD OF mp3. So the result is an albeit larger file than any MP3, but more importantly an accurate representation of the original without artifacts and in a much more compressed format than the original.

 

Last edited: May 31, 2025

It's pretty clear.
I wanted to compare different lossy mp3 settings, encoding from the same lossless original audio, spectrum included for info. Easy.
BTW I use flac mostly for classical music.

 

Yes.

 

Since there is really no comparing final results of mp3 inferiority to the original as far as audio quality I didn't really see the point. MP3 simply yields various flavors of crappiness (depending on the encoding settings) compared to FLAC or other lossless codecs. I use FLAC for everything because I grew weary of high end artifacts and just generic inconsistencies with mp3. To me, the gains in audio quality far outweigh the increased file size. To each is own...

 

Last edited: May 31, 2025

VBR (ABR is similar) should be the best option because it should mean "constant sound quality". That's what video encoders do. Of course, for streaming sometimes you need to limit the max bitrate or revert to CBR.
Notice the "shoulds", because many implementations suck and some players can't even properly reproduce them. Talking audio only here.
A couple years ago I converted some songs to VBR MP3 (perhaps AAC/MP4a) and my fucking Android player thinks a 3 min song lasts 5 min, so it enlarges its way out: 2 mfcking minutes of silence.

Also, @Dom_Perignon and @shinjiya are right: YT offers more and better options for the popular videos. But much less for audio lately. Also true that they stream audio and video separately. Which like he said, is understandable. You can tell this if you use JDownloader or yt-dlp.

For instance, for video you can find VP9 (Google's own codec) right from the start for higher resolutions.
If the video is popular, viewcount or similar, a new codec option will pop out: AV1, which is the most advanced video-codec.

Side note: the AV1 codec is totally free, which is even more shocking than nice. Reason being, for once, the greediness of mega-companies backfired with the H265/HEVC codec. Quite the story. I thought of making a thread about it but I'm lazy. And don't use ChatGPT

Edited: miss-tag

 

Last edited: Jun 1, 2025

Speaking about JDownloader and YouTube download:
In case of crappy audio, it is possible that the Opus audio file (generally the best option) is not checked in settings.
Note that JD won’t re encode anything: it just rips what is present on Youtube website

 

Re.YT - I've not heard of VP9, OPUS, AV1 etc.

So to recap - which are the best options for hq audio + video to download?
* I don't really care for more than 2 channels

 

Last edited: Jun 2, 2025

If you download the video using yt-dlp, it should give you the best option for audio and video joined in a mkv container. Support might be flaky outside of a PC or modern phone, but it should be the best option.

AV1 is not technically better than AVC, HEVC or VP9, but it is the most efficient. You get great image quality for low bitrates, which is why companies are investing in AV1 support: it uses less bandwidth for no noticeable quality drop. It's worth noting that AV1 doesn't scale well for high quality video, it's meant for efficiency only.

 

And what about OPUS ?

I use PC/Win10, 1080p video.

 

Last edited: Jun 2, 2025

If we're talking about YouTube, opus audio should be the best. Just use yt-dlp and it will take care of everything automatically.

 

What music are you guys downloading that can only be found in Youtube videos? I'm not asking about the technical processes of ripping from Youtube. You are using command line utilities, various 3rd party apps created for ripping YT videos or just the audio stream from YT and Jdownloader (which has its own bag of tricks that goes far beyond just Youtube functions). Bu is the subject about music from small independent artists who are on labels with no larger commercial releases?

I understand some live concerts, old recordings, world music, etc. can only be found on YT that individual users have ripped from vinyl and other similar sources. I even have a Mac application that is rather good at it; but the instances where I actually need to use it are few and far between.

 

It's convenient as f, especially for individual songs or video-clips. If you want more quality, then you need other methods.

Man, how can you say that. (most) Newer codecs are better and also slower to encode/decode because they're more complex. AVC/H264 is from mid 2000s, HEVC/H265 and first VP9 versions from mid 2010s. For the same size newer codecs offer more quality besides less size for the same quality..

What is true is they aren't so much better as quality increases. This applies to every lossy encoding: video, image, audio. OPUS and AAC are barely better than MP3 at 320kbps.

SOURCE: downloading pirate movies/shows since the emule days

 

Last edited: Jun 2, 2025

That's exactly what I said. It's better for efficiency, but it does not scale well for quality. You can look it up, AV1's whole concept is made for efficiency, it's not made for you to rip blu-rays.

Source: I'm from the old days of anime fansubbing, we were doing AVC years before major scene groups doing movies/shows started doing it. Anime piracy is always on top of the state-of-the-art stuff for quality.

 

I've looked it up too. Screw it. Let's just agree to disagree.

Ain't that true... lol. Facts. Like a third of the anime I download these days uses AV1. Nyaa FTW!!

There's even some advanced filters and even media players like MPV that have a big part of the development made by anime encoders

DivX -> XVid -> x264 -> x265 -> AOMenc

 

Last edited: Jun 2, 2025

Some nice tools audio-analysers besides Spek:

FakeFLac Win (Lossless audio checker)
https://github.com/Haki-22/FakeFLac-Lossless-audio-checker/

MusicScope - discontinued released as freeware
https://web.archive.org/web/20180520184032/https://www.xivero.com/musicscope/
Download https://archive.org/details/xi-vero-audio-tools

Lossless Audio Checker (Win - GUI Win,Mac,Linux - CLI) - discontinued freeware
https://web.archive.org/web/20230430101824/https://losslessaudiochecker.com

 

Orbitbooster 》
What app did you use for these plots?

 

Lossless Audio Checker is the only one that's supposed to work by actually trying to detect compression artifacts introduced by typical encoding algorithms.
It's funny to see how people use frequency analysis / spectrograms to judge about compression quality. All they show is low-pass filtering of the file, which could be from a compression process but they can tell nothing about compression loss other than that.

 

I'm a simple man: when I don't see the peaks breaking the ceiling, I trash the file

 

useless information in this post. but Theimo Stereo tool helps reverse this if you cant find a quality mp3 of a song