Save YouTube video as MP# file with youtube-dl

Written By Alan Torres

I frequently find myself needing to pull media for projects from youtube. youtube-dl makes easy work of this task that can otherwise be frustratingly difficult.

Make sure you have youtube-dl installed. If not, I recommend installing it with Homebrew

brew install youtube-dl

Use the following command to save the video’s audio stream as a MP3 file. The file will be saved into the current directory of your terminal. Make sure the URL used is copied from the “share” button on the video’s page. Other URLs may cause the command to fail.

youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 <url_of_video>
Alan Torres
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