We want to download a YouTube video, extract audio from it, and then convert it to an MP3.
Use youtube-dl for retrieving a YouTube video.
UPDATE: Now it’s 2025, and it seems that youtube-dl project on GitHub is not well maintained. As of 2025-08-20, last commit was made three months ago. However, there is an active fork yt-dlp. So best to use that for actual video retrieval.
Use ffmpeg to extract audio from the video file, and save it as a WAV audio file. The command is:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vn -acodec pcm_s16le -ar 44100 -ac 2 output.wav
Use LAME to convert the WAV file to an MP3 file. The command is:
lame --preset extreme input.wav output.mp3
Now your output.mp3 MP3 file is ready to be transferred to your MP3 player 😊
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made with ❤ by Valera Rozuvan