How to download music playlists from YouTube and YouTube Music: here we go. YouTube Music has been a real revolution, thanks to the low cost of the Premium package, the vastness of its catalog, its big brother YouTube and the ever-increasing quality of its audio formats.
In a world dominated by Spotify and where Apple also wants to work, YouTube Music has made music democratic, making a huge catalog available to everyone.
However, there are also some drawbacks: the official apps are only for mobile platforms and the rest are only available in the form of a web app or website. Like with YouTube, so to speak.
Also, it’s not that easy to download your music, especially if you don’t have the Premium package. Here then is that our dear beloved opensource world comes to our rescue once again.
Download music playlists from YouTube and, also for the music, again you: YouTube-DL
Whether you are a Linux, Mac, or Windows user, if you frequent this site you will know very well what we are talking about, but if not this is the link to one of the latest articles we wrote on YouTube-DL.
To install it on Linux: use your distro’s package manager.
As an example, on Ubuntu-based distros, in a terminal: sudo apt install youtube-dl
To install it on Mac: https://brew.sh/
To install it on Windows: http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html
In YouTube Music, find the playlist you want to download and find out how to download music playlists from YouTube and YouTube Music.
Format: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=[PlayList ID]
Like this: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWve40YdlXIxutCA4uoGsuV4vOwzEaBf5
And use the following commands to download it.
On Linux: youtube-dl --ignore-errors --format bestaudio --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 160K --output "%(title)s.%(ext)s" --yes-playlist 'https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=[PlayList ID]'
On Mac: youtube-dl --ignore-errors --format bestaudio --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 160K --output "%(title)s.%(ext)s" --yes-playlist 'https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=[PlayList ID]'
On Windows: youtube-dl --ignore-errors --format bestaudio --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 160K --output "%(title)s.%(ext)s" --yes-playlist https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=[PlayList ID]
Obviously, this solution also works very well to download playlists from YouTube – eliminating the video part and keeping only the audio one -; furthermore, we had created a little script to do this. Then we came across this more elegant and concise solution and we decided to offer you this one directly.
All related references can be found – as usual – here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48422377/youtube-downloading-a-playlist-youtube-dl