YouTube music

There is just so many music available to people on YouTube, it’s amazing. And with the advanced screening and copyright infringement reporting policies, as a user you can rest assured that the music on YouTube is available for you on purpose.

To utilize this music availability, I use YouTube-dl. YouTube-dl is a tool that allows you to (batch) search, select, download and convert video’s. The tool itself is not constrained to the use-case of YouTube, but that is just the provider this posts focuses on.

Commandline power

This is the command I’ve been using thus far for youtube-dl to download multiple tracks based on the tracksearch.txt file.

youtube-dl command
$ youtube-dl --default-search ytsearch2: -a tracksearch.txt --max-filesize 10M --min-views 1000 -f bestaudio -x --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 192
tracksearch.txt
lee rosevere - earthmover
brad sucks - making me nervous

Breaking it down

Table 1. Search

--default-search ytsearch2:

search via YouTube, and return 2 video’s, to have 1 failover if selectors --max-filesize and --min-views fail.

-a tracksearch.txt

use the lines of the tracksearch.txt as a starting point.
Table 2. Selection

--max-filesize 10M

Ignore found video’s with a file-size larger than 10Mb (video-file), which are likely to be full albums rather than single tracks.

--min-views 1000

Ignore found video’s with a view count under 1000, to prevent downloading bad uploads.
Table 3. Download

-f bestaudio

Download the video format with the best audio format, as we’re going for audio only in this case.
Table 4. Conversion

-x

Extract audio from the downloaded video.

--audio-format mp3

Convert to mp3 file format. I’ve chosen mp3 for playback compatibility, but the open standard ogg format can be selected as well, which has better audio quality performance as an added benefit.

--audio-quality 192

Convert to audio quality of 192kbps, good enough for this use-case.

Room for improvement

Now if multiple video’s (2 for this case) pass the viewcount and filesize selectors, all videos will be downloaded and converted. Ideally only 'the best' video will be downloaded. Likewise, appending the --get-duration option to the command will show the duration for the video, to ensure the downloaded song will not be too short or too long of a duration.

A free music alternative

Although this solution works well for several use-cases, I want to use this post to direct you to the Free Music Archive, a curated selection of free (as in freedom) music. A lot of music is actually CC-NC, so NonCommercial usage allowed, but let this not ruin your party. There are a lot of great artists on this platform, and there are several ways the platform supports discoverability of this great music.