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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Off the top of my head, isnt that just the -x flag?

I have a file under ~/bin called youtube-mp3 which has this one-liner:

    exec $HOME/d/youtube-dl/youtube-dl -t -x --audio-format=mp3 "$@"

(Edit: I'm sure this script does a lot more, but making ytdl download only the audio is fairly simple. Note the above command converts the file to mp3 which some people may not want to do because it's lossy.)

What is -t?

It (used to) cause youtube-dl to name downloaded videos after the title. Apparently it was needed in older versions of youtube-dl but is now ignored.

I also use --audio-quality 0 because it can be between 0 (best) and 9 (worst) and the default is 5.

It's a bit more than that. Eg: One can configure their own CLI arguments to keep track of particular playlist(s).

$ yt-audio --your-arg1 --your-arg2

This will sync playlist/audios configured against these arguments.

Sorry, no doubt your app does more than -x. I just meant for extracting audio alone.

I’m not near a computer but I was persuaded I have used youtube-dl -f mp3 https://... before.

Well, if you use just -x alone, it will not attempt to get the format you ask for. So you will probably end up with a m4a (mp4 container with just AAC audio) or ogg (vorbis/i think opus?) depending on whether the best quality is encoded in h264, WebM/VP8 or WebM/VP9. Which may not be what you want.

OTOH, if you specify a format directly without -x, it may not extract the audio alone. For example if you wanted M4A, you'd specify -x on top of specifying the format explicitly.

edit: as krick points out though, it doesn’t seem videos generally have an mp3 format, at least on YouTube.

I don't think -f mp3 would ever work, -f is for choosing file format to download. So -f mp3 would work only if there is a source with codename mp3, which I don't think I've ever seen. You may be using -f bestaudio -x or something along the lines of it.

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