Hi Jeffery,
I cannot speak to the personal logic, but I can share a reason why,
depending on the project, I might choose .wav.
granted I am a radio producer. For high quality broadcast work, one wants
the least compressed edition of a file..even if that file is very large
indeed.
Compression can happen with the m classes, stripping away of things. Wav,
and Aif, are considered to be reasonably lossless, and in theory better
sound quality.
Just a possible rational.
Karen
On Fri, 31 Jan 2025, Jeffery Mewtamer wrote:
Is there a reason to have yt-dlp convert extracted audio to .wav instead of
just leaving the extracted audio in its original .m4a(a tiny fraction of
YouTube content) or .opus(the vast majority of YouTube content) formats? I
mostly use yt-dlp for batch downloading entire channels for offline
listening on my Senseplayer, and other than having to rename .opus files to
.aac, have yet to have a problem with playing downloaded files since I
added the option to extract audio to my
~/.config/yt-dlp/config
file, and I would expect mpv to be less picky about file extensions.
Converting to .wav just seems like a waste of disc space(perhaps no an
issue for individual files you plan to listen and delete, but adds up if
batch downloading from a newly discovered creator with hundreds of videos
in their backlog), and conversion to an obsolete lossy format for archival
just seems bizarre.
And incase anyone finds it useful, here's the contents of my
~/.config/yt-dlp/config:
-o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" -x --cookies-from-browser firefox
the -o and what follows prompts yt-dlp to save downloads with the
title of the video and the file extension, the default
behavior gums up the filenames with the gibberish Google uses to give
each video a unique ID. the -x tells yt-dlp to extract audio without
doing further conversion or saving the original video file, which both
greatly reduces disk space requirements when downloading whole
channels and saves the hassle of manually extracting audio afterward,
and the bit about cookies cuts down on downloads failing due to
Google's anti-bot measures. And having all of this in the config file
means I can just invoke
yt-dlp [url]
at the command line.
Though, if anyone wants to suggest other useful things to put in my
config file, I would love to hear them.
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