How to Download High-quality YouTube Audios and Save in Appropriate Formats

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How to Download High-quality YouTube Audios and Save in Appropriate Formats

11 September 2019 Amanda J. Brook Senior Product Manager

Summary
Do you know how to get high-quality audios on YouTube? How to save them to the local disk? Which kinds of formats are suitable for high-quality audios? All answers are in this essay!

Part 1: About YouTube Videos and Audios

YouTube is always offering the best visual and aural experience for users. It keeps the high coding standards of uploads and continues to update the standards. By default, the VP9 video codec and the Opus audio codec are applied to YouTube. Basically, YouTube takes priority to playing videos in the WebM format on most browsers. If the browser cannot support VP9/WebM, it will automatically apply to the H.264 video codec and the AAC audio codec.

Codec	About
VP9	VP9 is one of the high efficiency video coding formats. It is free and royalty-free. Users can achieve clearer images at less consumption of bandwidth. Yet, decoding VP9 has certain requirements on the computer performance.
H.264	H.264 is an audio coding format with strong compatibility. It can perform on various operating systems, flexibly applied to low and high bit rates, low and high resolutions. Although the video quality is not excellent, it is still acceptable.
Opus	Opus is an audio coding format used to output the low-latency, real-time audios. The bitrate can be variable. Compared with MP3 and AAC, Opus can realize lower latency and increase compression ratio.
AAC	AAC is an audio coding standard for lossy digital compression, as part of MPEG-2. Compared with MP3 at the same bit rate, AAC generally achieves better sound quality.

In this essay, we pay more attention to audios on YouTube. In fact, there isn’t any absolute standard for audio quality. However, YouTube require users should provide the audios at 128 kbps or better. Although YouTube will re-encode videos to optimize the playback quality, the settings are still around the specifications based on most of users’ needs: 128 kbps or better bit rate, 44.1 kHz or higher audio sample rate and two stereo channels.

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Part 2: How to Get High-quality Resources on YouTube?

On YouTube, facing a large amount of videos and audios, how can we get our favorite contents? Next, we will talk about how to find out the high-quality audios and the great music producers on YouTube.

Find out High-quality Audios

First, users should use the search filter to target at some tags featuring high quality, like “4K” or “HD”. In addition, when searching the key words, you should try to add the words “hifi” (high fidelity), lossless. These settings can avoid the results of the low-quality audios.

If it is hard for you to make any comment on the audio quality, you can use a tool to test. In fact, the bit rate of a playing audio doesn’t stand still because YouTube has applied the variable bit rates to audios. You can go to the web (https://www.h3xed.com/blogmedia/YouTube-info.php), and then paste the YouTube URL or video ID to the box. This web will analyze and generate a bit rate report to you.

table of audio bitrate and formats and other values

Click to see the complete table

Upon the analysis, let’s pay attention to the rows where audio channels and audio sample rates are recorded. We can divide each numbers on the “bitrate” column by 1,000, and the results are the bit rates. In the “type” column, we can see the audio coding formats. These results tell us that the bit rates of this video titled “lossless audio” go up and down between 74 kbps and 164 kbps.

This tool can help users view the bit rates of audios and understand that most of YouTube audios reach to 128 kbps. Users can also use the tool to analyze the audios and filter out the low-quality ones.

Official Artist Channels

Many great music artists have opened YouTube channels. For example, if you type and search Lady Gaga, you will receive lots of related results, including the official artist channel (shown with a musical note). In their channels, you can listen to many songs. Generally, these songs are high-quality.

Recommended Music Channels

After finding out the favorite videos, you can subscribe to the YouTube channel. Next time the YouTuber publish new videos, you can receive the notifications and get more favorite videos. Here are some recommended music channels for you.

YouTube Music Channel (Multiple-languages, 128 kbps, High-quality)

Music, the official YouTube music channel, is the must-choice channel if you want to get high-quality songs. It usually publishes songs of professional singers. Hot pop songs recommended in this channel vary from the place where you settle. The location change can change the videos and channels shown to you.

TopMusicMafia (English, 128 kbps, High-quality)

Around European and American songs, it brings you the hot songs and playlists.

recommended youtube channel topmusicmafia

Goosehouse (Japanese, 128 kbps, High-quality)

Goosehouse is a gathering of Japanese music fans. It mainly gives acoustic performances of cover songs. This group is welcomed in Japan.

a youtube music channel from japan goosehouse

TAL (French, 128 kbps, High-quality)

TAL is a French singer. Apart from song personal works, she usually uploads cover songs.

Cloudx Music (Pure Melody, 128 kbps, High-quality)

It is a music channel for a variety of electronic dance music.

a youtube electronic music channel cloudx music

Part 3: Which Formats are for High-quality Audios?

When listening to the favorite songs on YouTube, you may want to save them in order to play them offline. Which formats are for high-quality videos? We recommend three audio formats, MP3, FLAC and APE. Among common audio samples, the MP3 bit rate seldom exceeds 350kbps but that of APE can reach to 600-700 kbps and FLAC even up to 1411 kbps. Basically, the bit rate between 128 kbps and 192 kbps can fulfill our daily needs.

Now, these three formats are commonly supported by many audio players, including Android media players. Some computer applications, like Potplayer, can play these formats, too.

MP3

MP3, a popular digital audio coding format, can compress about 90% of the original audio size. Despite of the complexity of its encoding, it greatly spurs high-quality audios to go through the Internet. Even nowadays, MP3 is still the common audio format. However, MP3 is a way of lossy compression. The highly compression ratio can miss part of the audio data. Especially when the bit rate is below 128 kbps, the high-frequency sounds will be obviously absent. Therefore, the bit rate should be above 320 kbps if you want to save an audio file in MP3 format.