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


This is what I use for my personal archive:
yt-dlp -f bestaudio/best --extract-audio --embed-metadata --embed-thumbnail --recode opus --audio-quality 0It does recode to
opusbut since thebestaudiois usually in that format already, you don’t need it most of the time. You can skip the--recode opuspart if you want to. I keep it because I like having a “uniform” collection. You can probably change thebestaudio/bestpart to simplybestaudiowithout losing much as well.Does it skip the recode completely if the format is already opus?
Yes, it does. It just repackages it from
.m4ato.opuswithout re-encoding the actual audio stream.