[jpstewart]

There have been at least a couple of threads here discussing youtube-dl in the past, so I thought I'd pass along a tip I wish I'd known about sooner.

In recent months YouTube has done something leading to youtube-dl being throttled to about 70 KB/sec download speed.  I put up with it for a while before doing some Google searching to find out what to do about it.  That's when I found out that:

1. it was a deliberate change by YouTube
   
2. it could be worked around but youtube-dl hadn't been updated to do so
   
3. there's a more actively-matined fork called yt-dlp that has the necessary changes
   

So, if anyone else out there is still using the original youtube-dl, I recommend you at least check out yt-dlp instead.  It's mostly compatible and it's man page clearly documents that changes they've made.

[Raion]

When I can, I'll update Nekoware for dlp

[lunatic]

a good opportunity to post this once more:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
# /usr/local/bin/yt2mp3
# A very simple bash script to download a YouTube video
# and extract the music as an mp3 file.
# use as:  yt2mp3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytvideoid

address=$1
regex='v=(.*)'
    if [[ $address =~ $regex ]]; then
    video_id=${BASH_REMATCH[1]}
    video_id=$(echo $video_id | cut -d'&' -f1)
    #video_title="$(youtube-dl --get-title $address)"
    video_title="$(yt-dlp --get-title $address)"
    #youtube-dl --id $address
    yt-dlp --id $address
    ffmpeg -i "$video_id".* "$video_title".wav
    lame -b 256 -h  "$video_title".wav "$video_title".mp3
    rm "$video_id".* "$video_title".wav

else
    echo "Sorry but the system encountered a problem."
fi

[jpstewart]

I hate to say it, lunatic, but that script seems like an unnecessarily and overly complicated way of extracting audio from a YouTube video.  There's no need to use ffmpeg to convert to wav and then lame to encode to mp3; ffmpeg can create the mp3 directly.  There's no need to manually call ffmpeg; both youtube-dl and yt-dlp have built in options for post-processing downloads.  YouTube even offers downloads of the audio and video already separated.  And there's no need to use those shell expansions to get the title; there are formatting options for that. 

If m4a audio will suit you, you could simply do:

Code:

yt-dlp --format m4a https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytvideoid

If you really want mp3, the entire script can be replaced with:

Code:

yt-dlp --format bestaudio --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --postprocessor-args "ExtractAudio:-b:a 256k" -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytvideoid

(NOTE:  watch for line-wrapping in the forum.  The above examples are each a single command line.)

The '--format bestaudio' part will download only the highest quality audio that YouTube has to offer, without the video.  Then '--extract-audio --audio-format mp3' will cause yt-dlp to automatically call ffmpeg and convert the downloaded audio to mp3.  Next, the '--postprocessor-args "ExtractAudio:-b:a 256k"' part ensures it creates a 256 kbps mp3 file, just like the '-b 256' in your lame command.  Finally '-o "%(title)s.%(ext)s"' causes yt-dlp to name the file just like your script would have, without the need for the extra parsing.

[lunatic]

I hate to say it, lunatic, but that script seems like an unnecessarily and overly complicated way of extracting audio from a YouTube video.  There's no need to use ffmpeg to convert to wav and then lame to encode to mp3; ffmpeg can create the mp3 directly.  There's no need to manually call ffmpeg; both youtube-dl and yt-dlp have built in options for post-processing downloads.  YouTube even offers downloads of the audio and video already separated.  And there's no need to use those shell expansions to get the title; there are formatting options for that.  

I did not know that. That is great indeed. This little shell script may be from a time before these features existed.