You could omit specifying the audio quality, in which case youtube-dl / yt-dlp will use the default '5' VBR quality So use '0' for best possible quality, but note that if the original quality is low, using '0' for the audio quality will cause an unnecessarily large file (which is not actually of high quality, since the source was low in quality). You can specify an exact bitrate, like 128K, 160K, etc., or a VBR quality value between 0 (best) and 9 (worst), with 5 being default. -audio-quality 160K specifies the audio quality that will be used by ffmpeg/avconv when converting to mp3 in this case.-audio-format mp3 specifies the audio format - mp3 in this case.-extract-audio as the name implies, it extracts the audio from the video.-format bestaudio downloads the best available audio quality format.-ignore-errors makes youtube-dl / yt-dlp continue in case of errors, for example to skip videos from a playlist that were removed, or that are not available in your country.Yt-dlp -ignore-errors -format bestaudio -extract-audio -audio-format mp3 -audio-quality 160K -output '%(title)s.%(ext)s' -yes-playlist '' Youtube-dl -ignore-errors -format bestaudio -extract-audio -audio-format mp3 -audio-quality 160K -output '%(title)s.%(ext)s' -yes-playlist '' To download an entire YouTube playlist (must not be private) using the best available audio format, extract the audio, and convert the resulting files to 160K MP3, use (this is a single command, triple left-click to select the entire command) using youtube-dl: For yt-dlp, see its installation instructions page.

Since some Linux distributions tend to take a while until they update youtube-dl, I recommend removing the youtube-dl package installed from the repositories, and manually installing it as explained on the youtube-dl download page. youtube-dl stops working regularly due to changes to YouTube, so you'll want to have the latest version installed on your system.

This article explains using youtube-dl / yt-dlp to download a YouTube playlist using the best available audio format, and convert it to MP3 (using FFmpeg, which youtube-dl / yt-dlp uses automatically for transcoding).įor this you'll need to have youtube-dl or yt-dlp and ffmpeg installed on your system.

Download ripping music from youtube