Is it possible to rip audio from youtube without loss of quality or online conversions? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by FartsUnited@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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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

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[-] pr06lefs@lemmy.ml 27 points 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.com 22 points 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)