Extract Audio From a YouTube Video

The following steps can be used to extract the audio from a YouTube video and convert it to a stereo MP3.

Notes:

• The steps assume that youtube-dl and ffmpeg are installed. For certain videos, youtube-dl may also need rtmpdump to be installed. On MacOSX, these programs are available from MacPorts.
• Some of this information came from the following articles:

  Peter Leung, Extract Audio Track From A YouTube Video, Linux Commando (Sept. 26, 2013).
  Howard Pritchett, Using ffmpeg to manipulate audio and video files, LINUX "howto" Pages (Feb. 1, 2012).
  Ricardo Garcia Gonzalez, youtube-dl Documentation (2014).
  Ask Ubuntu, How to download youtube videos as a best quality audio mp3 using youtube-dl [duplicate] (2015).

Method 1:

1. Using youtube-dl, download the audio track in wav (uncompressed) format:

   $ youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format wav -o [OUTPUT].wav '[URL]'

   Here [OUTPUT].wav is the name of the file that youtube-dl should save the audio to and [URL] is the URL of the video whose audio youtube-dl should extract.

2. After youtube-dl finishes downloading the audio track, convert the wav file to an MP3 using ffmpeg:

   $ ffmpeg -i [OUTPUT].wav -acodec mp3 -ab 256k -ac 2 [OUTPUT].mp3

   Here the option -acodec mp3 tells ffmpeg to convert the wav audio to an mp3 (other audio formats are also available), the option -ab 256k tells ffmpeg that the mp3 should be a 256k (high quality , lower numbers can be used for lower quality) mp3, and the option -ac 2 tells ffmpeg that the mp3 should be in stereo.

Method 2:

Tell youtube-dl to download the audio track and covert it to an mp3:

$ youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 0 -o [OUTPUT].mp3 '[URL]'

Here [OUTPUT].mp3 is the name of the file that youtube-dl should save the audio to and [URL] is the URL of the video whose audio youtube-dl should extract.

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