This post describes how to download and convert Youtube videos to mp3, in Ubuntu Linux. Please note that this is not an encouragement to copyright infringement, I use these tools for downloading and listening to videos on my long commute with the London Underground, where no GSM or Wifi signal are available.

Requirements:

youtube-dl  – “is a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites.”

ffmpeg – “is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video.”, required by youtube-dl.

libavcodec-extra-53 – Libav codec library, required by youtube-dl for converting files to mp3.

Install:

sudo apt-get install youtube-dl

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

sudo apt-get install libavcodec-extra-53

Script:

The following script (fetch.sh), will download videos based on URLs stored in a text file (tracks.lst):

#!/bin/bash
tracks=()
while read line
do
        echo -e "Downloading '$line'..."
        youtube-dl -q --console-title --extract-audio --audio-format=mp3 -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" $line
done < tracks.lst

Usage:

Resulting files should be stored with the name [Youtube Title].mp3, residing in the same folder as the script.

NOTE: If you do not wish to convert files to MP3, remove the “–extract-audio –audio-format=mp3” parameters in the above script.