Pluck

Download video and music from YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music links and almost any website, in a Mac app that feels like it came with your Mac.

⬇︎ Download Pluck for Mac  ·  free · macOS 14 or later · Apple Silicon & Intel · 10 languages

Paste a link or type what you're looking for, press Return, done. Pluck is a native SwiftUI front-end for yt-dlp, with Liquid Glass on macOS 26 and later.

• 🔎 Search right in Pluck: type a song or video name and download from YouTube Music or YouTube with one click
• 📋 Many links at once: paste or drop a whole list of links, or a text file full of them
• 🎵 Music done properly: the best audio on offer (256 kbps with YouTube Premium), cover art, tags and lyrics, and added to Apple Music automatically if you like
• 🎬 Any video quality, from 360p to 4K, clips of just the part you need, and pause and resume for big downloads
• ✨ Local AI, on your Mac: subtitles and translations, who said what, summaries and chapters, shorts, removing silences, clean audio, upscaling and smooth motion, new backgrounds, privacy blur and stems. Nothing is uploaded
• 📚 Library: everything you've saved, by kind and site, with tags, search, duplicates and the space it takes
• 🗜️ Convert your own files: extract audio, convert to MP4, trim, make GIFs, shrink a video to the size and resolution you choose, or compress photos
• 🌐 Almost any website: 1,800+ sites through yt-dlp, plus Spotify and Apple Music links and pages yt-dlp doesn't know
• ⚡️ Nothing to install: Pluck sets up and updates yt-dlp, ffmpeg and Deno for you, and updates itself

Install

Download Pluck.dmg, open it, and drag Pluck into Applications. The first time you open it, go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway, because the app isn't signed with an Apple Developer ID. After that, Pluck checks GitHub for its own updates and installs them when you click Install & Relaunch.

Features

Getting things in

• Paste a link (Pluck fills it in from the clipboard when you switch to it), drag one onto the window, or type words to search YouTube Music (songs) or YouTube (videos)
• Many links at once: paste several links (one per line or separated by spaces), drop a list of links or selected text, or choose File → Download Links from File… to read them from a text file
• Playlists: paste a YouTube playlist, or a Spotify or Apple Music album or playlist, and pick what you want. Items you already have are marked
• From any app: a shortcut you choose (⌃⌥⌘D by default) downloads the link you copied, without switching to Pluck. Or right-click a link or text and choose Services → Download with Pluck
• From your browser: a one-click bookmark (see below) sends the page you're on to Pluck
• Spotify: track, album and playlist links. Spotify audio is DRM-protected, so Pluck finds the matching song on YouTube Music and tags the file with Spotify's title, artist, album and a square cover
• Apple Music: song, album and public playlist links. Like Spotify, the audio is matched on YouTube Music; the file gets Apple's title, artist, album, track number, year and 1500 px album art. (Apple's playlist pages show about the first 50 songs.)
• Almost any website: yt-dlp supports 1,800+ sites. When it doesn't recognise a page, Pluck loads the page in an invisible browser, lets the player start (muted) and downloads the stream it finds, including embedded Vimeo, YouTube, Dailymotion, Twitch and SoundCloud players. DRM-protected streams are never downloaded. Sites that need a login use your browser's cookies (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Zen, Brave, Edge, Vivaldi, Opera or Chromium)

Quality

• Video: Best, 4K, 1440p, 1080p, 720p, 480p or 360p, in H.264 (plays everywhere) or AV1/VP9, as MP4, MKV or WebM, optionally preferring 60 fps
• Audio: original, M4A, MP3, Opus, FLAC or WAV. Pluck takes the best source and only converts when it has to. With YouTube Premium (and your browser's cookies) that's about 256 kbps instead of 128. Every download shows the quality it actually got
• Clips: click the scissors to download only part of a video, e.g. from 1:30 to 2:45
• Split into chapters: turn it on in the format menu and videos with chapters (DJ mixes, full albums) are saved as one file per chapter, each tagged with its own title and track number
• Lossless badge: shown when the audio stayed lossless from the source to your file. A FLAC made from a lossy stream doesn't get it

Music

• Lyrics from LRCLIB are written into MP3, M4A and FLAC files, so they show up in Apple Music and on iPhone
• Add to Apple Music: turn it on in Settings → Downloads to add every song you download, or only the file types you pick (M4A, MP3, WAV, AIFF, MP4, M4V, MOV). With All songs, FLAC gets an Apple Lossless copy and Opus/WebM an AAC copy, since Apple Music can't import those. Your original files stay where they are
• Cover art and tags (title, artist, album) are embedded automatically

Local AI

Everything here runs locally on your Mac: Apple's on-device speech recognition, translation, voice isolation, video processing and Apple Intelligence, plus open-source models for stems and speakers. Nothing you download, say or search is uploaded. Click the ✨ button on a finished download, or drop a video or song from your Mac on the window to use these on your own files. Select several items (⌘ or ⇧) to add subtitles, remove silences or clean up the audio of all of them at once:

• Subtitles & transcripts: transcribe any video or song, save an .srt, add subtitle tracks to the video or burn them into the picture, and translate them into one or more other languages
• Translate subtitle files: drop an .srt or .vtt on Pluck to translate it into one or more languages; the translations are saved next to it
• Who said what: up to four speakers are told apart; subtitles and transcripts show their names (rename them in Pluck Player) and summaries know who said what. The speaker model (about 230 MB, NVIDIA Sortformer) is downloaded the first time
• Remove silences & fillers: cuts long pauses and filler words like "uhm" into a tightened copy, at a tight, natural or relaxed pace. For editing, it can also save an EDL with the same cuts for DaVinci Resolve or Premiere Pro
• Clean up audio: removes background noise, hum and wind around voices with Apple's voice isolation, then levels the loudness for online video (−14 LUFS), podcasts (−16) or broadcast (−23). The picture is copied untouched
• Upscale & smooth: makes low-resolution video sharp in 1080p or 4K, and adds frames for twice as smooth motion or 2× and 4× slow motion
• New background: separates people from what's behind them, no green screen needed: blur the background, replace it with a colour or picture, or make it transparent (ProRes 4444) for your editor
• Privacy blur: finds faces and follows them through the video, and blurs or pixelates everyone except the people you keep sharp, optionally text like licence plates too
• Search inside downloads (⇧⌘F): find what was said and jump straight to that moment. Turn on automatic transcripts in Settings → AI so new downloads are searchable
• Summaries & chapters: a short summary with key points, and chapters for videos without them (written into the file, so QuickTime and Apple Music show them)
• Shorts: 1–5 vertical 9:16 clips from a long video. Local AI picks the best moments, each shot is framed steadily on the speaker or subject (titles are shown whole), and the spoken word is highlighted
• Caption styles: for shorts and burned-in subtitles, choose a highlight box or colored text, the color, a size and a font, including your own fonts
• Stems & karaoke: split a song into vocals, drums, bass and other, plus an instrumental (karaoke) version. The model (168 MB, HTDemucs, MIT) is downloaded the first time and checked
• Pluck Player: watch with the transcript, summary and chapters beside the video; click a line to jump there. Export the transcript as text, Markdown or Word, or save the frame on screen as a picture
• Spoken language: for your own files, Pluck asks which language is spoken before it writes a transcript, so summaries, chapters and shorts get it right

Requirements: transcripts, subtitles, search, shorts, filler words and upscaling need macOS 26 or later; summaries, chapters and the smartest search and shorts also need Apple Intelligence; speaker labels need Apple silicon; stems need macOS 27 on Apple silicon. Removing silences, cleaning up audio, new backgrounds and privacy blur work on every supported Mac. Features a Mac can't run are simply hidden. Third-party licences are in ThirdPartyLicenses.md.

Convert files on your Mac

Drop a video, song or photo on the window, or choose File → Convert Files… (⌘O):

• Extract Audio in the format you choose. Audio that's already in that format is copied without quality loss
• Convert to MP4 (H.264, plays everywhere). Files that are already compatible are only repackaged
• Compress to a size you pick with a slider (10–90% of the original), with a live estimate of the new file size. Keep the resolution, pick a lower one, or let Pluck lower it only when that looks sharper. Pluck encodes in two passes, so files land close to the size you chose
• Trim: turn on Only part of the file, enter a start and end time (e.g. 1:30 to 2:45), and keep just that part in the same quality. The part also works with every option above
• Make GIF from a video or part of it, in small (320 px), medium (480 px) or large (720 px)
• Compress photos (JPEG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF…) to JPEG or HEIC with a quality slider and an optional maximum size, optionally removing location and camera details. The size estimate is measured by actually compressing the photos with your settings

Your files

• Library (⇧⌘L): everything Pluck has saved, kept for good, in collections by kind and site, with your own tags, search, sorting, duplicates, missing files and the largest files. Right-click to open, tag, Quick Look or move to the Trash
• Send to DaVinci Resolve: right-click a download to import it into a "Pluck" bin of the project open in Resolve Studio
• Named your way: Automatic (Artist - Title for music), Title, Artist - Title, Title (Year), Channel - Title, or your own pattern like {artist} - {title} ({year})
• Albums and playlists go into their own folders (Artist/Album)
• Already downloaded? Pluck notices and offers to show the file instead
• Your downloads stay listed after quitting. Drag one straight into Finder, Mail or your editor, or select it and press Space for Quick Look

Downloading

• Pause and resume, even after quitting Pluck
• Automatic retry when the connection drops: Pluck waits for the internet to come back and continues where it stopped
• Up to 3 downloads at a time (adjustable), with live progress, speed and time left
• Notifications when downloads finish in the background: click to play the file, or use Show in Finder. Plus a Dock badge

On your Mac

• Menu bar icon with a progress ring. Closing the window keeps Pluck running in the menu bar until you choose Quit. It can open at login, in the menu bar only
• 10 languages: English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Chinese, following your Mac's language (or pick one for Pluck in System Settings → General → Language & Region → Applications)
• What's New after every update, covering everything since the version you had
• Works with VoiceOver: every control has a proper label
• Manages its own tools: yt-dlp (official release, optional nightly builds), ffmpeg/ffprobe (signed static builds) and Deno (the JavaScript runtime yt-dlp needs for YouTube). It checks daily, verifies every download's checksum, and for ffmpeg and Deno also the developers' signatures
• Updates itself from GitHub releases with one click
• Cookies work out of the box: on first launch Pluck picks the browser to read cookies from (your default browser when it can), so sites that need a login just work

Download from your browser

Add a bookmark with this as its address, and click it on any page to send that page to Pluck:

javascript:location.href='pluck://download?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)

Pluck opens with the link filled in; press Return to start. (A pluck:// link never starts a download by itself, so websites can't trigger downloads.)

Requirements

macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on Apple Silicon or Intel. On macOS 26 and later it uses Liquid Glass; older versions get the standard macOS look. Nothing else is needed: on first launch Pluck downloads yt-dlp, ffmpeg/ffprobe and Deno into ~/Library/Application Support/Pluck/bin and keeps them updated. To use your own Homebrew copies instead, turn off auto-update in Settings → Advanced.

Release

./scripts/release.sh 1.8.0 "What changed"

Add the version's notes to Sources/Pluck/WhatsNew.swift first (the script refuses to release without them); people see them after updating. The script bumps the version, builds the app, uploads Pluck.dmg, Pluck.zip and Pluck.zip.sha256 to a GitHub release, and tags it. Running copies of Pluck pick up the new version within a day, or straight away with Pluck → Check for Updates….

Translations

Strings live in Resources/Localizable.xcstrings (a String Catalog you can open in Xcode). After changing text in the code, run ./scripts/update-strings.sh to add new strings to the catalog, then translate them.

Build

./scripts/build-app.sh            # → build/Pluck.app
./scripts/build-app.sh --install  # also copies it to /Applications

---

_{Screenshots show search results and download progress for songs by Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan, with their YouTube thumbnails; no music was downloaded to make them. The interview is Tears of Steel (Blender Foundation, CC BY) with a made-up conversation, and the playlist shows Blender Studio open movies (CC BY). Pluck is meant for content you have the right to download.}