How To Download A YouTube Playlist And Convert It To MP3 Using youtube-dl or yt-dlp (Command Line)

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This article explains using youtube-dl / yt-dlp to download a YouTube playlist using the best available audio format, and convert it to MP3 (using FFmpeg, which youtube-dl / yt-dlp uses automatically for transcoding).

For this you'll need to have youtube-dl or yt-dlp and ffmpeg installed on your system. youtube-dl stops working regularly due to changes to YouTube, so you'll want to have the latest version installed on your system. Since some Linux distributions tend to take a while until they update youtube-dl, I recommend removing the youtube-dl package installed from the repositories, and manually installing it as explained on the youtube-dl download page. For yt-dlp, see its installation instructions page.

To download an entire YouTube playlist (must not be private) using the best available audio format, extract the audio, and convert the resulting files to 160K MP3, use (this is a single command, triple left-click to select the entire command) using youtube-dl:

youtube-dl --ignore-errors --format bestaudio --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 160K --output "%(title)s.%(ext)s" --yes-playlist '<YouTube playlist URL>'

It's the same for yt-dlp:

yt-dlp --ignore-errors --format bestaudio --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 160K --output "%(title)s.%(ext)s" --yes-playlist '<YouTube playlist URL>'

Command explanation:

  • --ignore-errors makes youtube-dl / yt-dlp continue in case of errors, for example to skip videos from a playlist that were removed, or that are not available in your country
  • --format bestaudio downloads the best available audio quality format
  • --extract-audio as the name implies, it extracts the audio from the video
  • --audio-format mp3 specifies the audio format - mp3 in this case
  • --audio-quality 160K specifies the audio quality that will be used by ffmpeg/avconv when converting to mp3 in this case. You can specify an exact bitrate, like 128K, 160K, etc., or a VBR quality value between 0 (best) and 9 (worst), with 5 being default. So use "0" for best possible quality, but note that if the original quality is low, using "0" for the audio quality will cause an unnecessarily large file (which is not actually of high quality, since the source was low in quality). You could omit specifying the audio quality, in which case youtube-dl / yt-dlp will use the default "5" VBR quality
  • --output "%(title)s.%(ext)s" represents the output filename template; in this case, it sets the filenames to be in the "video title.mp3" format. Without this (by default), youtube-dl /yt-dlp adds the video ID after the video name, which is not exactly pretty or useful in most cases
  • --yes-playlist makes it so if the URL refers to a video and a playlist, it still downloads the whole playlist. This is useful because if you find a playlist on YouTube, click on a video from that playlist, then copy the URL and try to use youtube-dl / yt-dlp to download it without --yes-playlist, only one video will be downloaded, instead of the entire playlist. This makes it so that in such cases, the entire playlist is still downloaded.
  • '<YouTube playlist URL>' is the URL to the YouTube playlist you want to download. You'll need to replace this with the actual YouTube playlist URL. Add single quotes on Linux and double quotes on Windows to avoid running into issues in some cases (as an example, if you skip the quotes, even when using the --yes-playlist option if the video URL includes a "&" symbol, only one video is downloaded).

It's also worth noting that the original video will be deleted, so once the command finishes processing all files, you'll only end up with MP3 files.

Example #1 - download a YouTube playlist and convert it to the highest available quality .mp3 (for yt-dlp, simply replace youtube-dl with yt-dlp in the command below):

youtube-dl --ignore-errors --format bestaudio --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 160K --output "%(title)s.%(ext)s" --yes-playlist 'https://www.youtube.com/list=PLdYwhvDpx0FI2cmiSVn5cMufHjYHpo_88'

Example #2 - download a YouTube playlist and convert it to the highest available quality .mp3, even when the link is to both a YouTube video AND a YouTube playlist (this works thanks to --yes-playlist and the fact that we've used single quotes around the YouTube URL; for yt-dlp, simply replace youtube-dl with yt-dlp in the command below):

youtube-dl --ignore-errors --format bestaudio --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 160K --output "%(title)s.%(ext)s" --yes-playlist 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsO6ZnUZI0g&list=PLdYwhvDpx0FI2cmiSVn5cMufHjYHpo_88'

Want to only download part of a YouTube playlist? Use --playlist-start NUMBER to specify the start number and --playlist-end NUMBER to specify the end number of videos to download. For example, to download video 5 to 10 from a YouTube playlist, use --playlist-start 5 and --playlist-end 10, like this (for yt-dlp, simply replace youtube-dl with yt-dlp in the command below):

youtube-dl --ignore-errors --format bestaudio --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 160K --output "%(title)s.%(ext)s" --yes-playlist --playlist-start 5 --playlist-end 10 '<YouTube playlist URL>'

But what if you don't have a regular YouTube playlist to download, but instead you have a text file with links to YouTube videos? You can download all the YouTube links in a text file by using --batch-file="/path/to/playlist.txt" instead of '<YouTube playlist URL>' (for yt-dlp, simply replace youtube-dl with yt-dlp in the command below):

youtube-dl --ignore-errors --format bestaudio --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 160K --output "%(title)s.%(ext)s" --batch-file="/path/to/playlist.txt"

Replace /path/to/playlist.txt with the path and name of the text file containing the YouTube video links.

For more on youtube-dl, see its help (youtube-dl --help) and the project GitHub page. For yt-dlp, check out its documentation here.
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