Sampling music in the MacOS terminal

Hello internet traveler! Do you want to download music from YouTube, but hate using shady web converters? I sure do. Here is a cleaner and faster way to download and sample all your favourite music using open-source software.

We'are gonna be using a Python package called yt-dlp (have a look at it's GitHub). MacOS already comes with Python, so the installation process should be straightforward. Try entering pip install yt-dlp into your Terminal, or reference the guide for detailed instructions. To check if you have yt-dlp installed, enter `yt-dlp --version`` into your Terminal. The version number should be printed out.

To extract audio only files from videos, we're also gonna need ffmpeg and ffprobe. Download ffmpeg from their official site and ffprobe should come included. To test if the installation was successful, try entering this ffmpeg into your Terminal. You should see a bunch of information about the package.

To set up an easy and replicable way of using yt-dlp, we have to modify our shell configuration file. For me (and most current version MacOS users), this is ~/.zshrc. you can find it using the Shift + Command + G shortcut in Finder and typing in the afformentioned filepath (~/.zshrc). This is just a simple text file, so editing it via TextExit works perfect.

Just add this silly little code (a shell function definition) to your shell configuration file, save it and you should be set. If you want to download to a different folder, just modify the --output parameter (in my case it is ~/Music, where ~ is the user home directory).

function sample() {
    yt-dlp -f 'ba/b' --default-search "ytsearch" --extract-audio --audio-format wav --output '~/Music/%(title)s.%(ext)s' $1
}

Now, when you open a new Terminal, you can download audio from YouTube by simply entering this command:

sample "your-youtube-link"

The .wav file should be at your specified --output directory.

As a bonus, you can also enter keywords inside the quotation marks to search YouTube instead od providing a direct link. If you run into any trouble, or are not sure about something, please feel free to hit me up on Discord.

Have fun sampling!