Just a little FYI for anyone wanting to download a playlist to listen to offline. Use yt-dlp. Load up the playlist, copy the URL, and then just run
yt-dlp --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 0 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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Does it download the actual music tracks from youtube-music, or does YouTube helpfully provide the video version of the music?
I've used a few downloaders and it seems these days that every music video is a whole "production" with 30 seconds of dialogue and intro before the actual music starts, or there's background noise over the first dozen bars (because the artist is in a cafe or car park or on the train in the clip) and all of that is just a bit tedious when listening to the audio only.
yt-dlp has SponsorBlock support/integration. So if the community provided the information, it can be dropped.
The video in YT and the music played in YTMusic are two different uploads, you can easily get one in YT by checking the YTM URL and getting the ID. So yeah, yt-dlp should get you only the song if you created a playlist with only songs instead of music videos.
It's whatever you put in the playlist. There's no surprises
It just downloads the audio file for the video, so if there is that crap, you get it. I haven't had many issues with extra stuff though. I send it a link like https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbNzvRx9lF_Tw6oi-I8iYbhBWNf775kwR and I get a good-enough-for-me bunch of mp3s.
Or on Android you can use YTDLnis which provides a nice frontend with lots of flexibility as to what is downloaded.