5 Ways to Download YouTube Playlist Videos to MP4 or MP3

There are many YouTube downloader programs and online services that you can use to download YouTube playlist videos, but some are taken down by DMCA, some are not maintained, and some will lead you to unwanted adware websites.

In this article, I will show you 5 different ways to download an entire YouTube playlist in one go. All have been tested working in 2024. Whether you use iPhone, Android phone, Mac, or Windows PC, you can find at least 2 working methods here.

Download YouTube Playlists Online

If you don’t want to download or configure anything, you can use an online YouTube video downloader. Surely, if you search it on Google, you can find many similar services that claim to be able to download playlists from YouTube. However, most of them cannot download copyright-protected videos, for example, official music videos.

This online YouTube Playlist Downloader allows you to download any playlist to MP4 or MP3. You can just copy and paste the playlist URL, and click the Download button to save each playlist video on your PC.

As you can see from the screenshot, you can also download YouTube playlists to MP3, M4A, AAC, FLAC, and other audio formats. If you prefer to save videos instead, you can save YouTube playlist videos as high as 8K. If you choose 4K or 8K resolution, the videos will be saved in WEBM format.

What’s more, you can also specify the playlist start number and end number to download some of the videos in the playlist.

YouTube Playlist Downloader for Windows and macOS

Suppose you care about the download speed and you also want to download some private YouTube playlists. In that case, you should try a dedicated YouTube Downloader program called ByClick Downloader, formerly known as YouTubebyclick Downloader.

Compared to the online downloader, YouTubebyClick is super fast and allows you to download private YouTube videos. It does require you to enter your YouTube login info, as it can get authentication from your web browser. You can also configure the output format, whether you want audio or video.

Besides YouTube playlists, you can also input YouTube channel URL to download videos from an entire YouTube channel. In addition, you can use it to download videos from other social media websites including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Currently, ByClick Downloader is only available for Windows. For Mac users, you can get 4K Video Downloader instead, which works pretty much the same.

Download Playlist with Yt-dlp

Yt-dlp is an open source program that allows you to download videos from thousands of websites with many custom options. Since the discontinue of youtube-dl, it is the best replacement. If you prefer using a terminal, then this is perfect for you. You can run it on Windows, Macos, Linux, Android, and iOS. Well, you need to install a free app called A-Shell to run YouTube-DL on iOS. 

Let me show you how to run it on Windows.

Step 1. Download yt-dlp.exe and move it to your user folder (C:/User/YourName).

Step 2. Download FFmpeg and extract the file. This will combine audio and video for very high quality videos. If you only need to download 720P videos from YouTube, you can skip the FFmpeg part.

Step 3. Open the FFmpeg folder and copy everything from the “Bin” subfolder to your user folder where the yt-dlp.exe are located.

Step 4. Press Windows + R. Type “CMD” (without quotes) and press Enter.

Step 5. In the Command Prompt window, type “yt-dlp.exe [youtube playlist url]” and press Enter.

When the process is complete, you can check the user folder to watch the downloaded YouTube video. There are many parameters to define how you want to download YouTube playlist videos. For example, you can include the “–playlist-start” and “–playlist-end” to download some videos from the playlist.

It is possible to use YouTube-DL to download private YouTube videos, but very complicated. You can use it to download private Facebook videos in HD by using “–u” and “–p” to input your YouTube login info.

There is also a configuration file. You can modify that file to change some default options. If you want to use this tool on your Mac, you can refer to this guide.

Grab YouTube Playlist with iOS Shortcuts

iOS users can also use the online downloader to convert YouTube playlist to MP3 or MP4, but I prefer Shortcuts because I can run it from the YouTube app share sheet. Shortcuts is a powerful automation stock app since iOS 13, but most people never use it. You can refer to the steps below to see how it works.

Step 1. Make sure you have the Shortcuts app on your iPhone or iPad. Then get this YouTube Playlist Ripper Shortcut. Currently, it only supports MP3. I will release a new version to download videos in a playlist.

Step 2. Open YouTube and find the playlist that you want to download. Tap on the Share button. From Share Sheet, select More and scroll down to tap on the YouTube Playlist Ripper shortcut.

Step 3. Now it will list all videos in the playlist and you can uncheck any of them if you don’t want to include all.

Let it run and you can open the Files app > iCloud/Downloads to check downloaded files. You can change the destination path to your iPhone or iPad. Just locate the Save File action in the shortcut and change the folder path.

Android App for Downloading YouTube Playlist

There are many free apps for downloading YouTube videos on Android. For download playlists in a fast way, I recommend Seal, a yt-dlp GUI app for Android. As you may imagine, you cannot find it in the Google Play Store. Instead, you can download it from GitHub.

It offers you one button to download all videos from a YouTube playlist or channel. Of course, you can choose your preferred video frame and format. In addition, Seal also allows you to download YouTube videos with embedded subtitles.

Wrap Up

Hope you find these five methods helpful for downloading YouTube playlists. For most people, I recommend ByClick Downloader. It is simple and fast. I prefer the yt-dlp approach. I even use it on my Android phone and iPhone.

For iOS users, you can download the A-shell free app with Python 3 pre-install to run yt-dlp. For Android users, you can use the Termux app to install and run yt-dlp on Android to download playlists from YouTube.