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

  • @pr06lefs@lemmy.mlEnglish
    27•1 year ago

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

    • @infinull@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      22•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)