youtube-dl for Music

2022-02-20

A friendly public-service announcement: youtube-dl supports audio-only downloads.

My main use cases for YouTube these days are:

• listening to work music
• watching videos while on a stationary bike

So if I'm craving a song to get into the flow of things, I reluctantly unblock it from my /etc/hosts and eventually digress distractedly into watching actual videos. Disaster!

Who knew that youtube-dl could solve this problem for me? (Many people. I'm a little slow here.) Now I just download the music I care about and play it locally, thus disentangling a legitimate need from the Swamp of Entertainment.

If you don't have youtube-dl, there are sites that can do this for you. OnlyMP3 looks reasonably non-sketchy, but I can't vouch for it.

Onward and upward!