this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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Ko-Fi Liberapay
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I've been using Clipgrab (macOS) to download music (mp3s) from YouTube. I've seen some mentions that the quality (real bitrate as opposed to what the file states) is bad to begin with on YouTube and that downloaders might make it worse. How bad is the quality of what I'm downloading? Any better downloaders or does the quality suck to begin with?

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[–] twistedtxb@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

Please somebody correct me if I'm wrong:

Separate audio is rarely available on streaming sites like YouTube, so if you're ripping a song from it, you essentially are transcoding the files three times:

  • Encoding by the content creator
  • Extracting the audio from the the content
  • Encoding in the format of choice

So no matter how great the quality is at either of these transcoding ends, you are still transcoding in lossy format at least two times

[–] Cevilia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

yt-dlp can just download the audio. It usually comes down in m4a at quality that I would describe as "very listenable". So only the first of those three steps are mandatory if you do it that way.

yt-dlp -x <url>

[–] twistedtxb@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago

But is the source separate on YT's server is what I'm wondering.

If not, there's a transcoding stage

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