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?
Please somebody correct me if I’m wrong:
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:
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
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.
yt-dlp -x <url>But is the source separate on YT’s server is what I’m wondering.
If not, there’s a transcoding stage
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.