YouTube indeed has a very large music collection, which I think is the best place to discover new music. Recently, I have noticed the tools I used to download music videos from YouTube do not work anymore, so I have done some research to figure it out.
In this article, I will show a few ways to convert YouTube to MP3 on iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, or Linux. no matter what device you are using, you can find a perfect solution here to download music videos from YouTube to MP3 or M4A.
Download YouTube Video to MP3 on iPhone or macOS
Since iOS 13, you can use Safari to download files on iPhone. There are many online YouTube downloaders out there, that you can use to download videos from YouTube, which you can check the next method.
Better than the online YouTube Downloader method, you can use the Shortcuts app, provided by Apple, to download videos from YouTube directly to Camera Roll, and of course, you can also use Shortcuts app to download YouTube to MP3 as well.
Previously known as Workflow, the Shortcuts app was acquired by Apple in 2017. Since iOS 13, the Shortcuts app becomes a stock app that comes with your iPhone iPad. If your Mac is running macOS Monterey or newer versions, you can use this method to download YouTube to MP3 on Mac with the Shortcuts app.
To quickly extract audio from YouTube videos, you can simply get the YouTube Music Downloader shortcut from our YouTube shortcuts collection.
You can copy the link to the Youtube video that you want to download and run this shortcut. In a few seconds, it will download the YouTube videos as MP3 on your Apple device. Once downloaded, you can specify a location on your iPhone or iCloud to save the audio file.
From our YouTube shortcuts collection, you can also get the YouTube Playlist Downloader shortcut for downloading YouTube Playlist. When you input a URL to a YouTube playlist, this shortcut allows you to download all videos in the playlist in one go.
If you love using Shortucts to download videos, you should also check our ultimate downloader shortcuts collection.
Batch Convert YouTube to MP3 Online
Recently, quite a few online YouTube downloader tools no longer work when you are trying to download music videos or some copyright-protected videos. Luckily, there are some that still work.
Just go to the Loader website and paste the YouTube video URL and click Start. Then you can download the video directly or choose to download it in MP3 or other audio formats. Since it is an online tool, you can use this tool no matter what device you are using.
If you want to batch download a few YouTube videos at a time like a playlist, you just paste a playlist URL. It allows you to download up to 20 videos in a playlist at a time. Just paste the YouTube playlist link and select an audio format MP3 or M4A. You can also select a video format of course. When it finishes conversions, it will start to download automatically as a zipped file. You can unzip it and get all your YouTube audio files.
Download YouTube Video with Open Source Tool
YouTube-DL is a very powerful open-source software, which I often use. You can actually use it to download video or audio from many websites besides YouTube. Previously, I have written about how to use it on Windows, so here I am going to show you how to use it on Mac.
Updated in 2023: YouTube-DL has been discontinued for some time, yt-dlp is a better replacement. Simply change “youtube-dl” to “yt-dlp”.
Step 1. Open Terminal. Then paste the text below and press Enter. You may need to enter your passcode to confirm.
/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"Step 2. When that is complete, which may take 30 minutes, type “brew install yt-dlp” (without quotes) and press Enter.
Step 3. YouTube-DL is installed. You can type “yt-dlp -f m4a [Video URL]” and then it will download the audio-only.
If you want to download it as a video, simply type “yt-dlp [YouTube URL]”. When you find that yt-dlp stops working, simply update it by typing “brew update” into the terminal.
If you want to convert YouTube to MP3, then you need to install FFmpeg by typing “brew install ffmpeg”, which will take some time. After that, you can type “yt-dlp-f bestaudio –extract-audio –audio-format mp3 [URL] ” to download YouTube as MP3.
You can find the downloaded video and audio from the User folder. In addition, you can run youtube-dl on Android with the Termux app.
YouTube URL to MP3 on Android
Seal is an open source GUI version of yt-dlp for Android. It also has FFmpeg built-in, so you can use it to download MP3 from YouTube videos. Since it is not available on Google Play Store, you can download the Seal app on its GitHub release page.
Once you paste a YouTube URL into Seal, tap on the Download button and it will give all options regarding format and quality. For MP3, set the “Download type” as “Audio”. The default audio format is M4A or OPUS, so you need to tap “Convert” and select “Convert to mp3”.
Below Additional settings, “Cookies” is for downloading private YouTube videos. “Save thumbnail” is for saving the video thumbnail as the audio cover art. Once configured the settings, you can tap the Download button to convert YouTube videos as MP3 on your Android phone storage.
YouTube to MP3 Converter for Windows
There is also another YouTube downloader tool that allows you to download any video to MP3 or MP4. If you prefer a GUI tool, then this may be the best for you. It is free to use and no ads.
After installing this software, you need just paste any YouTube video URL or Playlist URL to download. No login is needed. As you can see from the screenshot, just check the option Also Save as MP3 to download it as MP3.
When you input a YouTube playlist URL, you can click to download all the videos in the playlists. You can also uncheck any of the videos if you don’t want to download any of them.
YouTube to MP3 Converter for Mac
MediaHuman YouTube to MP3 Converter is another lightweight, straightforward tool that allows you to download Youtube videos as MP3 fast and efficiently. It is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This tiny app lets you input URLs of videos, channels, and playlists and saves them as MP3 files to your local storage with one click. Moreover, you can use the Tracking feature to automatically download channel and playlist updates.
compared to other YouTube to MP3 downloaders, this tiny tool does more. It extracts the artwork and other metadata. It allows you to download private videos that you have access to. You can choose to save to MP3, OGG, or M4A with your chosen bitrate quality, add downloaded music to iTunes, limit downloading speed, etc.
Conclusion
That’s all 6 free ways you can use to convert YouTube to MP3. The audio downloaded is 192kbps or 128kbps, which is the original quality. Some tools claim to download videos to MP3 as 320kbps, but they simply upscale the audio bit rate. It only increases the file size without improving the sound quality at all.
Now, it is your turn. Which method do you like the most? If there is any problem, let me know in the comments.
Amazing, the first method worked better than any other I’ve seen in mobile
It works fine now.
Hi.
Not an expert on shortcuts, so my question is:
What causes the term ‘conversion error!’?
I thought it may be too long a playlist or video but after some testing it is neither of those things