OT Question on audio downloads from youtube

[Roger Bell_West]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 01:03:45PM +0100, Budge wrote:
>I have in the past had issues with .m4a but can try again as it has been a while.  
>I am always suspicious of using terms such as "best" because it is not a defined term but a subjective one.  
>If I go to mp3 then my concern is that I may be further compromising the quality.  
>I believe the sound is encoded as AAC in the Youtube.  If I am correct then which format sticks most faithfully to AAC and will work with my systems.   I shall do a few tests following your reply and see how I get on.

Use youtube-dl -x and it will automatically get the version with the
least-lossy available audio, strip off the extraneous video, and leave
you with a file that is just the audio stream. (Not always m4a;
sometimes it's opus.) That's the version you keep in your archives.

Then if you need to play it on something that doesn't understand that
format you transcode it as needed.

Or of course feed it to something like mpd, which is what I use round
the house. (You'll want to tag it first.)

R