yt2audio

yt2audio is a little Bash wrapper around youtube-dl yt-dlp which helps you to grab audio tracks from YouTube videos, and other providers, and convert them to a given list of popular formats (default=MP3).

Files will be downloaded to the current working directory. If you plan to download a playlist, I suggest you to create a directory for it first...

usage

   yt2audio.sh [-s] <URL> -p <URL-list> [-d] <songs.txt> [-l] <file.txt> -a <audio-format>

    -s URL          download a single song
                    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXXXXXXXX

    -p URL-list     download a play list
                    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXXXXXXXXX&list=YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY" <-- between double quotes!
                    https://foo.bandcamp.com/album/bar

    -d songs        download songs as described in songs.txt

                     songs.txt must be in the following format:

                     artist_1 - song_1
                     artist_2 - song_2
                     [...]
                     artist_n - song_n

                     i.e.:  skinny puppy - assimilate
                            genocide organ - ave satani
                            haus arafna - new skin grafting

    -l file         download YouTube links listed in file.txt

                     file.txt must be in the following format:
                     
                            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=descriptor_1
                            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=descriptor_2
                            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=descriptor_3
                            [...]
                            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=descriptor_n

    -a audio format
            available options: 
                    best
                    aac
                    vorbis
                    mp3  <-- default
                    m4a
                    opus
                    wav

Wherever you see "YouTube" you may use other providers. Please run youtube-dl yt-dpl --list-extractors to see the list of all supported platforms.

NOTE: please, keep in mind that yt2audio relies on yt-dlp, so if a certain provider is not supported by the latter, it won't be available from the former either.

disturbances in The Force

Sometimes you may list an artist or a song and you could get something totally unrelated if what you are looking for is not available. I would suggest you to try searching on, say, YouTube first to check whether the tune exists... if not, just enjoy the new (unknown?) songs :-)

Every now and then, the script will fail and it won't be able to download anything from anywhere.

Most likely, you only will need to update it.

If you installed yt-dlp using your system's package manager, I recommend you to update it using it as well, otherwise you will see an error message like this:

$ yt-dlp -U                     
Current version: stable@2023.11.16 from yt-dlp/yt-dlp
Latest version: stable@2023.12.30 from yt-dlp/yt-dlp
ERROR: You installed yt-dlp with a package manager or setup.py; Use that to update

requirements

yt2audio needs youtube-dl yt-dlp to handle all the downloads, and ffmpeg for audio format conversions, so they need to be installed on your system.

You can install both using your system's software management tool (i.e.: zypper, yum, apt, dnf...)

disclaimer

This script was created out of lazynes so I did not need to memorize all the options I had to use in order to extract audio tracks from videos.

It is provided on an "AS IS" basis. The author is not to be held responsible for the use or misuse thereof.