saving the audio from a YouTube video

[timlance]

Though I have owned Amadeus Pro for a couple of years I have only now found this need. I have some YouTube videos from which I want the audio. How to get the best quality audio file?

[KurtL]

When I've saved YouTube files locally they have appeared as mp4 file extensions. Amadeus Pro can open and read in the audio from mp4 files. Embedded within that file will be an audio track; most commonly it is an AAC stream, but it can also be other formats (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP4_file_format ). But, regardless, the audio quality was baked in when the mp4 file was created: the format, the bandwidth, etc all are set at creation, and all you can do is try not to degrade it further when you save it.

So the answer is really not YouTube specific; it's the same answer for any file you want to preserve the quality of when saving. For absolutely no degradation you want to choose a file format and parameters that is lossless (like AIFF or FLAC), while still being compatible with your intended playback device. If your playback system can only handle compressed formats (like AAC or MP3) then you would set the parameters (like bit rate) to the highest quality/least compression for best quality.

It is also possible to extract the compressed audio directly from an MP4 (search "extract AAC from mp4" and a list of commercial programs will be listed). Another way to do it with free software is to use the command line utility ffmpeg; you can download and install ffmpeg using the brew package manager. The details are listed in this stack exchange article: https://superuser.com/questions/186465/ ... c-from-mp4 .

[timlance]

Much thanks!

So you're saying there is not a simple process using Amadeus Pro.

[timlance]

Audacity does a great job of this.

Sure do wish Amadeus did.