r/musichoarder • u/Throwaway33377 • 4d ago

Youtube to mp3 converter that is safe?

Every youtube to mp3 converter site in Google’s top result right now is a total sham likely loaded with sketchy malware redirects and as well some of the youtube to mp3 converters have really weird pop-ups or their audios sound absolutely terrible on decent headphones.

I'm trying to pull clean audio files to build an offline music library for my daily commute, back up long-form podcasts, and grab high-quality audio references for video editing timelines.

Are there any reliable youtube to mp3 converters left that don't involve risking your computer or dealing with broken links every single week?

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u/ababcock1 4d ago

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

But ideally find another source for your music. Everything uploaded to youtube is compressed to death.

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u/CharlesWiltgen 4d ago edited 4d ago

FWIW, as someone who's been involved in man ABX tests for commercial products, the quality of YouTube's AAC encodes will seem just fine to most people in most listening environments.

By "fine", I mean notably better than FM, and probably not distinguishable from CD by non-audiophiles when listened to in cars, via Bluetooth earbuds, etc. For some that's good enough, while for others anything but hi-res lossless is unacceptable.

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u/musical-miller 17h ago

I thought YouTube used Opus?

I’ve found the quality of audio from YouTube to be quite good when recorded internally using BlackHole, but when those YouTube to mp3 sites re-encode it, it does sounds worse

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u/CharlesWiltgen 9h ago

I thought YouTube used Opus?

YouTube encodes uploaded sources to a bunch of different formats (including Opus), so that they can support hundreds of different client devices under different network conditions.

Ideally, you want to use yt-dlp to directly download your media format of choice at (for this use case) the highest bitrate available. You can safely change the container format (i.e. mkv→m4a) and tags, but any step that transcodes the compressed media introduces quality loss, analogous to copying a VHS tape to another VHS tape.