YouTube is the kingdom of digital entertainment. It hosts more than 2 million media files every day, including songs, podcasts, audiobooks, etc.
If you don’t spend $11.99 a month on the subscription service, you won’t be able to save these kinds of audio tracks for offline enjoying and import them into GarageBand, iTunes, or iMovie for editing.
This article will briefly explore methods on how to download audio from YouTube on Mac.
Cisdem Video Converter is a robust yet simple to extract audio from YouTube, SoundCloud, Mixcloud, Myspace, Bandcamp, Tumblr, and other numerous sites. It will download audio from YouTube without reducing the audio quality.
It can download YouTube music in bulk, and perform audio conversion to be compatible with your devices. This YouTube audio downloader for Mac supports a large range of formats to suit any device imaginable.
Standout features of the app:
Part 1 Download YouTube videos
Step 1. Launch Cisdem Video Converter, and go to the “download” interface.
Step 2. Get YouTube video link
Browse to www.youtube.com and find a video that contains the audio you want.
Copy the YouTube URL from address bar.
Step 3. Download YouTube video
Back to the "download" interface of Cisdem, and paste the URL to the text box at the bottom.
Besides, click “File > Input URLs” on the top main bar to copy and paste more URLs in the popped-up new window to batch download more videos at a time.
Click to begin downloading video from YouTube.
Part 2 Extract audio from downloaded YouTube videos
Step 4. Convert downloaded YouTube to audio like MP3, FLAC, or other formats
Hit to open a window where stored the YouTube video you downloaded.
Drag the video to the “convert” interface, and choose the output audio format you desire.
Finally, click to rip audio from YouTube on Mac.
VLC is a free multimedia tool that's famous for its excellent playback function. In fact, it can also help you download YouTube video and transcode it to MP3, OGG, FLAC, etc.
Since 2019, however, YouTube has continued to destroy VLC downloads in their ways. VLC has to frequently change the code in youtube.luac.
To be honest, VLC is not a great YouTube audio downloader for Mac. Its steps are too cumbersome and can't download YouTube songs at a time.
youtube-dl is an advanced download manager for video, audio, and playlist from YouTube, Naver, and a few more sites. You can input the command (i.e. --audio-quality 160K) to specify the output audio quality.
This method is only suitable for users who mastered some basic code technology.
Call attention to:
Y2Mate is a widely used resource to extract audio and video from YouTube online for free. There are two output formats - MP3 and MP4. You don't need to install the extra apps or plugs.
But the audio quality is up to 192 kbps (even the original is 320kbps) and the video resolution is up to 1080p (even a 4k video). If your input YouTube video is large or long, the URL detection speed will be very slow.
It's actually the same as the online tool. The principle is to apply an URL trick to jump straight to the online YouTube audio downloader for Mac.
Many tricks you can use to fetch YouTube video, e.g. changing “youtube” to “ssyoutube” or “youpak”, adding "pwn" before "youtube", etc. But not all of them are able to download audio from YouTube on Mac. To extract audio file, try the following:
YTmp3.cc is a simple online converter that designs to download YouTube videos into MP3 or MP4 format. Although it supports limited format, it is easy for everyone to use through a browser, and it does a good job in downloading audio from YouTube for free.
If you just want to extract audio from YouTube on Mac, the pre-installed audio recorder - QuickTime Play can do you a favor.
No, you can’t!
Despite a large number of YouTube downloaders in the Chrome Web Store, none enables you to fetch YouTube audio. Since 2014, almost all add-ons remove the functionality of YouTube download to avoid offending YouTube's Terms and Conditions.
It depends on the type of video you download. It's illegal to distribute, sell, and make copies of copyrighted content. But you can download YouTube audio files:
As it's a gray area, we suggest that you do not use copyrighted YouTube music or audio tracks for commercial purposes.
We have explained the ways to download audio from YouTube on Mac. To download audio without software, the online tool - Y2Mate is a good solution. But to rip lots of YouTube audio files at the same time and without quality loss, the dedicated application - Cisdem Video Converter is perfect. And don’t waste your time on Chrome or Firefox extensions.
Peter has always had great enthusiasm for writing, programming and web development. He likes writing about software and technology, his works are featured on some tech blogs or forums like Tom's Hardware, CNET, etc.