59

I was wondering if it was possible to download a youtube playlist as mp3 using youtube-dl, skipping already existing files. I am using this command: 

youtube-dl --continue --ignore-errors --no-overwrites --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --output "%(title)s.%(ext)s" [path here]

and, even though I set it to not overwrite, it does redownload everything from scratch. Is this possible?

Ravan
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Warrior
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  • even though it redownloads it usually skips writing the file by default even without that option set – mchid Sep 12 '15 at 21:24
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    Ok, if I keep the downloaded video along with the mp3 file, the skipping function works properly. Not exactly what I needed but it is ok. – Warrior Sep 16 '15 at 09:43

3 Answers3

103

With the option --download-archive FILE youtube-dl both reads and adds to a list of files not to download again. Every time a file is successfully downloaded, that video id is added to FILE.

You can use it as follows:

youtube-dl --download-archive downloaded.txt --no-post-overwrites -ciwx --audio-format mp3 -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" [path here]

It will redownload any videos from before that you didn't keep for one last time as it creates the list. You can now delete them.

If your MP3 files had been named with the default format of %(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s, you could have avoided the redownload by creating downloaded.txt from the youtube %(id)s in a bash terminal as follows:

for n in *.mp3
do if [[ "$n" =~ -[-_0-9a-zA-Z]{11}.mp3$ ]]
   then echo "youtube ${n: -15: 11}" >> downloaded.txt
   fi
done
Eliah Kagan
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Martin Thornton
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    Valuable answer here. It solves my problem. thank you. – Warrior Jan 11 '16 at 10:56
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    What is -cwix here ? – bteo Jun 21 '17 at 18:16
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    -cwix is a shorter alternative to --continue --no-overwrites --ignore-errors --extract-audio – Martin Thornton Jun 24 '17 at 09:05
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    It's worth mentioning that while this works perfectly for YouTube, youtube-dl also works with other sites (e.g. Soundcloud) where the -x option seems to break the output. You can safely remove that flag if you're downloading from an audio source. – christianbundy Aug 02 '17 at 18:55
  • What should "youtube" be replace with if I'm downloading from somewhere else, specifically podcast episodes from simplecastcdn.com? Edit: I'm dumb. It's still just youtube. I guess for youtube-dl, not for a video coming from youtube. – Marcel Jun 17 '22 at 15:38
12

This is really helpful. If it's of any use to anybody, I modified the code to create the existing downloads list to include all files in the folder. Useful if downloading audio with the --extract-audio and --audio-quality "best" flags

create_download_list.sh:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

for n in .
do if [[ "$n" =~ -([-_0-9a-zA-Z]{11}).*$ ]]
   then echo "youtube ${BASH_REMATCH[1]}" 
   fi
done > downloaded.txt

I'm sure most people could have worked that out for themselves, but not everyone is clued-up with bash scripting.

cuppajoeman
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Jeremy Paul Carroll
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0

I use the following approach:

yt-dlp --download-archive downloaded.txt --no-post-overwrites -ciwx "put format here" "put url here"

And I use the code below for downloading youtube playlist with tons of videos which also requires membership.

yt-dlp --cookies cookies.txt --download-archive downloaded.txt --no-post-overwrites -ciwx "put format here" "put url here"
zx485
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Furkan_o.
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