« Kevin Ngo

Extracting Sound from Youtube Videos with youtube-dl

22 Dec 2011

One of my first programming pet projects was a set of wrapper scripts for youtube-dl with interfaces to Rapidshare and Reddit. Then, I didn’t recall youtube-dl having an option to extract audio out of videos though previously I did contact the maintainer and requested it. Eventually, I ended up getting a pull request into youtube-dl for Soundcloud functionality. Looking at youtube-dl now, it has very many useful options including the previously mentioned audio extraction as well as some of what I implemented (batch processing).

To extract audio from a YouTube:

youtube-dl –extract-audio –audio-format mp3 -o %(title)s [youtube-link]

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The -o option lets you specify how you want the output file to be named. I prefer it as the literal title. It also supports simplified title with no spaces %(stitle)s.

There you go, a clean one-liner for some Youtube harvesting goodness.