If I want to download a whole audio playlist, I copy the link from YouTube and in the terminal I just type youtube-dl -f 140 (and then paste the link + enter) and it starts doing the whole thing by itself and I can leave.Įven my old Samsung Galaxy Y with Android 2.3.6 and a fabulous 189MB of RAM supports m4a decoding by hardware. Not a big deal for a few files but it can make a big difference in a long list.Īnd knowing how to work with youtube-dl from the terminal is very practical. The main difference you may find for big lists is time, as in m4a you download the direct file from YouTube and with MP3 the audio m4a or even the video mp4 has to be downloaded and then converted to MP3. Regarding file size and audio quality, for the same bitrate you won't find practical differences between MP3 and m4a. Youtube stores several audio only files with different bitrates (hence quality) both in m4a and webm. If you're OK with m4a, you can use youtube-dl or even video converter to download things in m4a. I use it for podcasts, sometimes YouTube only has higher quality audio that I don't need for storage, I'm fine with 64kbps.īy the way, I think video downloader downloads and converts files to MP3 since YouTube doesn't store anything in this format. It has some presets and you can even tweak them or create your own if you want to convert to another quality. You can do it manually but if you have a lot of videos already downloaded to convert to MP3 you can download WinFF from the repos, a GUI frontend for ffmpeg that allows you to convert a series of videos to mp3 at once, and it supports drag & drop. I may be a little late to the party, but as said, ffmpeg does the job.

Mp3 youtube download program