OT Question on audio downloads from youtube

[David Cantrell]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 10:56:45PM +0100, budge wrote:

> Please forgive the OT question but I am seeking advice on sensible 
> download format for saving the audio from youtube videos which are 
> available to supplement specific items from my early music collection.
> 
> My preferred solution is to download the audio using youtube-dl and I 
> know I could then encode the file as a flac file but this creates huge 
> files, albeit lossless ...

FLAC is a lossless format, true, but if you're starting with
lossily-encoded data in m4a or mp3 format like what youtube gives you
then you won't gain anything, the data has already been lost.

>                             Also, as a more senior citizen, I believe I 
> am unlikely to be able to hear the difference between the flac and other 
> options.

Even for people with fully functional ears the difference between a
decent mp3 or m4a and lossless is imperceptible. The only reason for
archiving stuff in flac is so that you can produce whatever the
flavour-of-the-decade is in the future when mp3 and m4a have gone out of
fashion, without re-encoding an already lossy file and losing more.
Re-encoding a lossy file to another lossy format is *very* noticeable.

-- 
David Cantrell | Official London Perl Mongers Bad Influence

    Erudite is when you make a classical allusion to a
    feather.  Kinky is when you use the whole chicken.