I use IDA (Internet Download Accelerator).
It downloads all the YT videos that other softs doesn't download (because of some "protections" with Youtube).

 

Just for the record.. what is wrong with this method? (right-click on the vid..)

 

I use "Free YouTube Downloader" - simple, choice of video size, choice of audio quality.

Occasional vids seem to be 'blocked' - maybe 1 in 100?

It will grab whole playlists too (maybe in paid version only).

 

I used 4k Downloader for a while and liked it. I paid for it after a while because the paid version allowed me to do playlists in bulk.. and i was downloading 100s of hours of lectures, duplicated in both video and audio.

And as Matt777 says, jDownloader works.
I have downloaded many things with it, too.

 

Well,I have tried this Internet Download Accelerator....And for me it is a big *hit!...First video I want to download,and IDA doesn't work,he can't download this file..I try again and it doesn't work again.Then I get a message in a window saying "pro version for [some] dollars"..
I have already uninstalled it.

 

I've tried all sorts of video downloaders. JDownloader is the best for me for Youtube.
The only advantage of dedicated software like YTD/4kDownloader I could find was to create a playlist file when you download a playlist. JD can easily (and it's tweakable) download playlists but AFAIK can't create a playlist file.

 

http://convert2mp3.net/en/index.php
to convert YT to mp3 or mp4 (video) and it got also Firefox plugin.

https://www.vb-audio.com/Voicemeeter/banana.htm
for audio and it works also with ASIO!
I use both. Voicemeeter replaced the standard Win mixer so I can listen to yt or any other audio source while playing ASIO devices.

 

oh this is actually pretty nice with all the different codecs and stuff. Never expected such quality audio from a youtube download. Thanks will be using youtube-dl instead.

edit: What to do with the .opus and .m4a files to make them usable for my sample library (I ony sample people slamming their hammers on beer bottles) eg. in what format do I convert them to make them usable?

 

Last edited: Sep 19, 2018

Is there a format any other format .opus can convert to other then .mp3 without losing quality? (for use in my DAW off course)

edit: just converted a whole library to 320kbps .mp3 not bad at all.

 

To add some more confusion.. lol
.ogg and .m4a (.mp4) are containers which may contain all sorts of stuff. opus and AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) are coding formats, codecs with which we are dealing here. AAC produces better quality audio than MP3 and opus should be even superior at any given bitrate..

This is how I see it. First, here you have a lossy format (meaning - lossy compression of the original recording). Every conversion to another lossy format will degrade (change) the audio. In fact, because here you are always dealing with different data encoding, every and any conversion will cause the same.

Therefore I don't think converting e.g. opus to mp3 is a good idea if your intention is using it in your DAW. As soon as you'll import your mp3s into it, your DAW will convert it again to the audio format of your project (probably wav of some sort).. and here you have 2 conversions. You can skip one if you convert the audio stream from the video directly to the "standard" of your DAW project..

 

Here are my numbers after checking .ogg and .mp4 (jDownloaded) files with Mediainfo:
.ogg
"Format": "Opus",
"Duration": "4724.768",
"Channels": "2",
"SamplingRate": "48000",
"OverallBitRate": "137168",
.mp4
"Format": "AAC",
"Format_AdditionalFeatures": "LC",
"CodecID": "mp4a-40-2",
"Duration": "4724.797",
"BitRate_Mode": "CBR",
"BitRate": "125588",

Funny thing, YT leaves AAC in the vid + separate .ogg.. anyway, I don't think they would give us 192+

 

What I do:
1) download the highest quality audio: opus and aac are of similar quality with the typical YT bitrates (128, 152, 192,... ). OGG vorbis would be a bit worse. MP3 a bit worse than Vorbis. But if you found 192Kbps MP3 vs 128Kbps opus go for MP3

2) like @Matt777 has well explained, all those codecs/formats are lossy. Every time you save them is like saving (encoding again) a jpeg picture and you lose quality. Convert to WAV (lossless, no quality loss) and load on your DAW.
Always keep the original opus, aac, mp3 (lossy).

PS. Avoid like a plague all the Google codecs YTube (Google) tries stick into our asses. Most of them come in the free .ogg container.. ironic.

 

Last edited: Sep 20, 2018

Tricky, isn't it? When I download audio I have to check the audio of the best quality video besides the individual audio-only qualities.
M*f*ers... lol

 

Regarding youtube-dl, which is a command line utility, so it should be in your path to run it from any folder. In linux that's /usr/local/bin, usually. If using Windows you can put it in the Windows directory. This is how it works:

1) you start it with youtube-dl -F [copy/paste a link from the website] from a folder you want to download the file in.
you get this output:



2) then you write youtube-dl -f720p [copy/paste a link to your file] to download the 720p version of the video.
3) wait for it to download.
4) success! Fappidy-do, fap-fap, bang!

Note that using -F in the first step is unnecessary when you know the format code you want to download. For Youtube you get many different options, downloading only audio or video, or both, amongst others. So it's recommendable to check what formats are available for a particular video beforehand.

This thing works with so many websites... not just Youtube. I used PornHub link here as an example.

This is what the format info ["-F"] output for Youtube Depeche Mode live video in Berlin 2017 looks like:



Then you just use youtube-dl -f136+140 [link] to download format 136 of the video and multiplex it with format 140 audio to get a pure MP4 file. For best quality result you should use webm format 247 video and 251 audio. You can choose and mix whatever formats you want. Nothing is being re-encoded, these are original files from Youtube. I love this tool, how small and simple it is, and it always works!

Cheers!

 

Last edited: Sep 20, 2018

Yes very nice, thank you.

I just want to commented back on the users who said I should encode my to .wav files, which makes sense, cause .mp3 is worse. Bitrate with .wav is now 1536 kpbs compared to .mp3 files which maxed out at 320 .kbps

I love this .opus file format already :D