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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:
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
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>
But is the source separate on YT's server is what I'm wondering.
If not, there's a transcoding stage
From my use of this, it downloads a video and extracts the audio stream from it. In fact, you can see this as it leaves the video file on disk while it's extracting the audio, and the audio-extraction process uses a decent amount of cpu (takes a few minutes for long concert sets on my raspberry pi). AFAICT, there's no way to only download the audio without incurring the unnecessary bandwidth and CPU usage.
Edit: I just checked and the CPU usage seems to be coming from the fact that I am asking yt-dlp to convert the audio format. Now I'm questioning whether it is actually the video that I've seen temporarily on disk or just the audio file in the youtube-native format.
It varies based on the age of the video, newer ones do indeed have separate audio downloads. You can force audio only with
yt-dlp -f bestaudio
This will cause the script to only consider audio-only formats, if bandwidth is a concern. However, how it decides which one is "best" is beyond me. For example, I tried one video and got a webm that contains only an audio track:
~ $ yt-dlp -f bestaudio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
[youtube] Extracting URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
[youtube] dQw4w9WgXcQ: Downloading webpage
[youtube] dQw4w9WgXcQ: Downloading ios player API JSON
[youtube] dQw4w9WgXcQ: Downloading android player API JSON
[youtube] dQw4w9WgXcQ: Downloading m3u8 information
[info] dQw4w9WgXcQ: Downloading 1 format(s): 251
[download] Destination: /data/data/com.termux/files/home/storage/movies/ytdl/20091025__Rick_Astley_-_Never_Gonna_Give_You_Up_Official_Music_Video.webm
[download] 100% of 3.28MiB in 00:00:00 at 6.91MiB/s
Yes, I deleted my comment after I checked the command line I was using and testing it out. The CPU usage was because I was using the --audio-format flag with something other than m4a/opus or whatever it is that youtube uses natively. And the file I saw on disk was not the video, it was the audio file in youtube's native format.
For reference, I'm using $ytdl -f "bestaudio/best" -ciw -o "$audioroot/%(title)s (%(upload_date>%Y-%m-%d)s).%(ext)s" --extract-audio --audio-quality 0 --audio-format mp3 "$vidurl".
I haven't seen a YouTube video without a separate audio track. If you use yt-dlp just add -F and the URL to get all available download options/formats. Then use -f and the number of the download option and URL to download the video/audio. Audio on YouTube is available in two formats most of the time: opus and m4a.
YouTube audio quality isn't amazing, but it's not that bad if you get the right format. Using yt-dlp, you can get opus audio that sounds way better than mp3. Example: yt-dlp -f 251 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ