How to Save Music from YouTube Music Streaming or Channels

Any YouTube music piece can be saved into your mobile or computer for offline and unlimited listening.

YouTube is the #1 video hosting platform and also the most-viewed site on the planet. Although it never intended to be a music-centric streaming site, this video empire is actually a big catalog of both professional and amateur music, attracting numerous music publishers and song nerds into its rich library for further new releases and to seek for what music he/she is longing for. According to Google’s report in 2019, 1 billion users visit YouTube for music and this is just the data of one month. What a huge amount!

If you are one of those common music video viewers and want to save music from YouTube for more flexible playback, say in totally offline or poor-Internet environment, on portable iPod, music/MP3 players and so forth, you can obtain several methods in handy from this post.

1. Become a premium subscriber to free save music from YouTube

Both YouTube and Google Play Music’s premium services offer user ad-free & offline playback and content download capability, be it YouTube Music’s official MV or general streaming video. That’s to say, officially, subscribing such an account could get in-app music downloading thing done once and for ever if your country or location is among the Premium’s available locations. Let’s take a look at the prices in detail:

With either of these subscribed account, you are free to enjoy ad-less YouTube originals and music on your iOS, Android mobile and desktop with the same email logged in. Considering quite a lot people simply want to listen to the music audio, it’s integrated with background playback functionality to have music playing while doing other things and extra “audio-only” mode to load audio file only. At the same time, download option is also given for one-click keeping a saving of original single song, playlist, album and offline mixtape in preferred video quality like 720 HD, 360p Medium and Audio only.

But there are some things you must know before paying for the Premium account:

– No all music videos can be downloaded because some may be undownloadable due to video creator’s restriction.
– To enjoy the download feature or downloaded music offline without limit, you should firstly make sure you are always at the Premium-available places and then remember to go online for the auto-renew every 30 days.
– If you leave YouTube Premium available country/region and go on a travel in Premium-unlikely one, you won’t gain the free download benefit any more. And the previously downloaded files will become unavailable 30 days later too.

2. Employ Screen Recorder to Save YouTube Music to MP3, MP4 etc.

This is the most flexible method to move online music from YouTube to local space. Nowadays, many new mobile and desktop systems have internal screen recorder like Windows 10’s game bar, macOS’s QuickTime screen recording, and screen recorder baked into iOS/Android gadgets. However, all of them are not enabled to record system sound including music coming from YouTube due to privacy issue. That makes a third-party YouTube (music) recorder a must-have. In view of many mobile devices are not ideal for source-intensive screencasting, you are suggested to move on to more powerful desktop or laptop to do music capture work without hassle.

RecMaster is an easy, safe, stable and feature-packed desktop screen recorder that’s available for both Windows and macOS. You can free download it now and then start to record any official or unofficial YouTube music at high quality.

This YouTube recorder has multiple screen capture modes to meet various user demands. Specifically, you can play whatever music video in full screen and utilize RecMaster’s Full Screen to make a 1:1 copy of it as MP4/AVI/MOV etc. You can choose to play music in any mode and have RecMaster’s Custom Area to crop and save a fixed area of it. What’s more, you can take advantage of Audio only to extract audio from YouTube music and format it into lightweight MP3, WAV, M4A alike.

Apart from media format, when initiating a video capture, you are still empowered to define the quality, frame rate, webcam inset, audio volume, and do scheduled recording by setting start & end time on Windows and duration on Mac.

When using RecMaster to record single, playlist, album or even the whole channel music, you can manually pause and resume to skip the annoying ad, pick the favorite songs to combine into a single file. Any language subtitle/cc  transcript can be attached into MV if you have preset and display it before the capture. When the capture mission is completed, RecMaster gives access to save the recording to Google Drive and YouTube privately.

See also: Best Formats for YouTube Record/Download

3. Use YouTube Downloader to Rip Video/Audio from YouTube

Ripping music from the web is a common practice and related downloading sites and apps pop up just like the mushrooms after Spring rain. On account of every YouTube music clip uploaded online has multiple available configurations by default to satisfy varying playback requirements and Internet connection conditions, those YouTube downloader services or apps are born with ability to parse YouTube music video via a link, list downloadable options, and allow anyone to one-click download the proper one fast. Some programs may feature connecting your YouTube account on software and download your saved playlist at will.

Selecting the right safe YouTube downloader is important because many tools, especially the online ones, do contain malware to affect your downloading operation and even hard your PC. Therefore, I suggest you to rely on an installed app rather than any (free) web downloaders. Top-ranked posts from Digitaltrends and wikiHow have recommended 4KDownload products like 4K Video Downloader, 4K YouTube to MP3, and here I want share open-sourced VLC media player and youtube-dl to all of you.

Guides:
How to download online (YouTube) video with VLC
Is youtube-dl still available on Github?

Ending

It’s easy to save music from YouTube with either of the methods mentioned above. And to protect the intellectual property of music, you are suggested to achieve the premium account to download music legally. If you still want to download, converter or capture any songs for offline playback, do follow the realted terms of use and laws.