I read somewhere that it is possible to rip youtube videos (music only) without the need for converting it into an mp3 as such.
The online conversion process (naturally) results in loss of quality, and (apparently) it is possible to preserve the original video’s audio quality via a direct rip. If so, how would it be done and what format would it be in anyway?
thanks
If you want an online tool, cobalt.tools can rip the original youtube audio if you choose “best” format in settings -> 🎶. It’s also FOSS with no tracker/ad garbage so I can recommend it as an alternative for yt-dlp which has been mentioned already.
yt-dlp has the -F parameter to list the available stream formats. (uppercase F to list, lowercase f to select)
I use -f 251 to download the opus audio stream, and afterwards use ffmpeg -i file -c copy file.opus to copy the opus audio stream in an opus file format file (codec copy so without encoding losses).
