I was tired of searching for online tools to download youtube lectures as mp3. First of all, It was not an efficient solution and secondly every now and then some of the domains were getting blocked or were expired. And extensions also had the same kind of problems as well.

Today edited my previously wrotten oneline Youtube-dl mp4 downloader bash command to download mp3 from Youtube.

Installing Youtube-dl

Installing youtube-dl in Ubuntu is very straight forward. Just copy and paste this two command into your terminal. It'll be installed.

sudo curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

Downloading audio

Basically it is a simple bash function. It will only take one argument which is your youtube video link.

ymp3() {
	youtube-dl -x --embed-thumbnail --audio-format mp3 "$1"
}

Copy the code above and paste it to the other alias inside of your .bashrc / .zshrc file. Now restart your terminal.

If your desired Youtube video is this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_1DQzh3GDY, then you can just type

ymp3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_1DQzh3GDY

If the command doesn't finish successfully and you find any error like ERROR: ffprobe/avprobe and ffmpeg/avconv not found. Please install one., you have to install an additional package the continue. To instal that package, type

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

After the installataion try downloading your audio again with previous command. When the task is finished you will find your desired mp3 with thumbnail included 😎️