yt-audio

Download YouTube audio for the macOS Music app.

By default, yt-audio saves .m4a (AAC) files to ~/Downloads, with available metadata, chapters, and cover art. Other formats are available with -f.

Install

Install with Homebrew from the rib3ye tap:

brew install rib3ye/tap/yt-audio

Homebrew installs yt-dlp, ffmpeg, and atomicparsley automatically.

To update, run brew upgrade yt-audio yt-dlp. To uninstall, run brew uninstall yt-audio.

Usage

yt-audio <youtube-url> [more-urls...]

Examples:

# Single track → ~/Downloads/
yt-audio "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw"

# Download and import straight into the Music app
yt-audio -a "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=..."

# Pick the output directory
yt-audio -d ~/Music/Imports "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=..."

# Pick the output format (default: m4a)
yt-audio -f mp3 "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=..."

# Grab a whole playlist (off by default — a single video is downloaded otherwise)
yt-audio --playlist "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=..."

Options

To save your defaults, add these environment variables to ~/.zshrc:

export YT_AUDIO_DIR="$HOME/Music/Imports"
export YT_AUDIO_FORMAT=mp3

Formats

All listed formats support --add. For m4a, yt-audio copies native AAC streams without re-encoding.

YouTube audio is lossy. The alac and wav formats avoid another lossy encode, but cannot restore lost quality.

Manual PATH setup (optional)

To install manually, run these commands from the repository directory:

brew install yt-dlp ffmpeg
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
install -m 755 yt-audio ~/.local/bin/yt-audio

If ~/.local/bin is absent from your PATH, add this line to ~/.zshrc:

export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

Open a new terminal to use yt-audio from any directory.

After changes to the script, repeat the install command to update the copy. To uninstall the manual copy, run rm ~/.local/bin/yt-audio.

License

MIT © Noah Tsutsui