I’ve been using Clipgrab (macOS) to download music (mp3s) from YouTube. I’ve seen some mentions that the quality (real bitrate as opposed to what the file states) is bad to begin with on YouTube and that downloaders might make it worse. How bad is the quality of what I’m downloading? Any better downloaders or does the quality suck to begin with?
YouTube audio quality isn’t amazing, but it’s not that bad if you get the right format. Using yt-dlp, you can get opus audio that sounds way better than mp3. Example: yt-dlp -f 251 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
Separate audio is rarely available on streaming sites like YouTube, so if you’re ripping a song from it, you essentially are transcoding the files three times:
Encoding by the content creator
Extracting the audio from the the content
Encoding in the format of choice
So no matter how great the quality is at either of these transcoding ends, you are still transcoding in lossy format at least two times
I haven’t seen a YouTube video without a separate audio track. If you use yt-dlp just add -F and the URL to get all available download options/formats. Then use -f and the number of the download option and URL to download the video/audio. Audio on YouTube is available in two formats most of the time: opus and m4a.
yt-dlp can just download the audio. It usually comes down in m4a at quality that I would describe as “very listenable”. So only the first of those three steps are mandatory if you do it that way.
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