YT Music Downloader

A desktop application to download audio from a YouTube playlists and automatically embed metadata. The project supports CLI and GUI modes, was designed to download the music using pytubefix and a integration using thread pools.

Current support: Linux only (tested on Ubuntu-based systems). Windows/macOS support and standalone binaries will be added later.

Features

• Download audio-only streams from YouTube playlists
• Output format: M4A (AAC)
• Automatic metadata:
  • Title
  • Artist
  • Album
  • Cover video thumbnail
• Parallel downloads using thread pools
• Cancelable downloads
• Two execution modes:
  • CLI (terminal)
  • GUI (desktop app using Flet)

Project Structure

YT-Music-Downloader/
├── src/
│    ├── ytmd/
│    │    ├── downloader/
│    │    ├── interfaces/
│    │    ├── utils/
│    │    ├── app.py
│    │    └── __init__.py
│    └── __init__.py
├── pyproject.toml
├── .gitignore
└── README.md

System dependencies

Need a Python 3.12+ version. The GUI relies on mpv through Flet, which requires the following system libraries:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libmpv-dev libmpv2
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libmpv.so /usr/lib/libmpv.so.1

Installation

1. Clone the repository

git clone git@github.com:Malk97sc/YT_Music_Downloader.git
cd YT_Music_Downloader

2. Create and activate a virtual environment

Instead of using venv or conda, I gonna recommend using UV to manage the virtual environments.
UV

uv venv ytVenv
source ytVenv/bin/activate

3. Install the package

uv pip install .

Usage

After installation, the command ytmd becomes available system-wide inside the virtual environment.

CLI mode

ytmd --cli

You will be prompted to enter a YouTube playlist URL:

Playlist URL: <URL_link>

GUI mode

ytmd --gui

This launches the desktop interface where you can:

• Paste a playlist URL
• Cancel downloads at any time

Output

Downloaded files are saved in:

YT_Music_Downloader/Songs/<Playlist Name>/

• The application downloads audio-only streams, not MP3.
• M4A is chosen to preserve original quality and metadata support.
• Playlist downloads are parallelized for better performance.

Each track is saved as:

• Format: .m4a
• Metadata: embedded using mutagen

Note

This project is intended for educational and personal use only. Please respect YouTube’s Terms of Service and copyright laws in your jurisdiction.