I download a lot of audio from YouTube. Long interviews, mixes, old radio sets, the odd song I want on my phone for a train ride with no signal. So I have been through a lot of converters, and most of them are unusable now.
You know the pattern. You paste a link, hit convert, and a second tab opens behind the one you are on. Then a green button that says DOWNLOAD which is an ad, sitting above the real link, which is grey and small. Then a browser prompt asking to send you notifications. By the time you get the file you have closed four tabs.
These three are the ones that survived. I still use all of them, on different devices, for different jobs.
What I mean by ad free
Worth setting the bar, because everyone uses the phrase loosely:
- No pop-up or pop-under tab when you click anything
- No fake download buttons sitting next to the real one
- No "allow notifications" prompt
- No redirect to an app store or a browser extension you did not ask for
- No account, no email, no "verify you are human" wall before the file
Two of the three below have no ads at all because nobody is paying for them. The other one runs a couple of quiet banner slots, which I will be upfront about when I get to it. What none of them do is hijack your click.
How I tested
I ran the same six things through each tool:
- A normal music video, roughly three minutes
- A 90 minute podcast episode
- A playlist of about 40 tracks
- A YouTube Short
- A live stream replay that was over two hours
- One video I knew was blocked in my country
I checked whether the file actually played, whether the MP3 kept its title and cover art, and how many clicks it took to get from a pasted URL to a file in my downloads folder.
1. yt-dlp, if you are willing to type
yt-dlp is the engine. Not a website, not an app with buttons, just a command line program that a huge number of other downloaders are quietly built on top of. It is free, open source, and there is no company behind it that could decide to start showing you ads next year.
Once it is installed, converting YouTube to MP3 is one line:
yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 --embed-thumbnail --embed-metadata "PASTE_URL_HERE"
That gives you an MP3 with the title, the artist field filled in where YouTube has it, and the thumbnail baked in as cover art. Add --audio-quality 0 if you want the best the source can give you.
It handles a 40 video playlist without complaining, it resumes when your connection dies mid file, and it is the only one on this list I trust with a three hour stream replay.
The catch is obvious. You have to install Python or grab the binary, you have to know where your terminal is, and the first time you run it you will probably paste a URL without quote marks and get an error about a missing argument. If that sentence annoyed you, skip to number two. If it did not, this is the best YouTube MP3 downloader there is and nothing else is close.
2. YouTubeToMP3X, for everything else
This is the one I use most, purely because it takes no setup. It is a browser tool, so it works the same on my laptop, on a work machine where I cannot install anything, and on my phone.
You paste the link, pick MP3, pick a quality, and the file arrives. There is a paste button that reads your clipboard so you are not fighting with a text field on mobile. No sign up, no queue, no "your download will begin in 30 seconds" timer.
What made me stick with it over the other browser based converters:
The MP3s come out tagged. Title, artist, and a square cover image pulled from the video thumbnail, so your phone's music player does not show a row of grey squares. Most free sites hand you a bare file named something like video_1.mp3.
There is a trimmer built into the page. You drag two handles across the waveform bar and it cuts just that section, so you can pull a 20 second piece out of a video for a ringtone without opening Audacity afterwards. I use this more than I expected to.
It does more than audio. MP4 if you want the video, WAV if you need an uncompressed file for editing, playlists, Shorts, and thumbnails, plus the usual other platforms. There are separate pages for each of those, which is handy when you just want the right settings already selected: the 320kbps page is the one I have bookmarked.
To be straight with you about the ads: there are one or two banner slots on the page. They sit in the layout, they do not follow you down the page, and clicking convert does not open a tab. That is the whole distinction I care about. You can find it at youtubetomp3x.com.
Where it loses to yt-dlp: very long files are slower, because the work happens on their server and then has to travel back to you. A two hour stream is fine but you will wait. For a normal song it is a few seconds.
3. Seal, on Android
Seal is an Android app that wraps yt-dlp in a normal looking interface. Open source, free, on F-Droid and GitHub, no ads and no trackers in it at all.
The reason it belongs on this list rather than in a footnote is the share sheet. You are in the YouTube app, you tap share, you pick Seal, and it starts. You never copy a URL or open a browser. For grabbing a podcast while you are already lying in bed, that matters more than any feature list.
It embeds metadata and thumbnails the same way yt-dlp does, because it is yt-dlp underneath. Playlists work. It downloads the yt-dlp updates itself, which you will need occasionally when YouTube changes something and downloads start failing everywhere.
Two things to know. It is not on the Play Store, so you install it from F-Droid or from the GitHub releases page, and Android will warn you about installing from an unknown source. And there is no iPhone version. iOS is the one place where a browser tool is genuinely the easier answer.
Two that nearly made it
Open Video Downloader is yt-dlp with a proper desktop window on Windows, Mac and Linux. Open source, no ads, updates itself. It only missed the top three because if you are already installing a desktop program, you may as well install the real thing and get the speed. Still, if the terminal is the only thing stopping you, start here.
VLC can technically do it. You open the network stream, find the media location, save it, then convert. It works, and it is already on your computer. It also takes about eight steps and I have never once reached for it on purpose.
The ones I stopped using
I am not going to name and shame individual domains, partly because the ones people search for, ytmp3, y2mate, yt1s, the mp3juice style sites, mostly are not single sites any more. They are names with dozens of copies. You search the name, you land on whichever clone bought the ad slot that week, and the clone is not run by whoever built the original.
What I kept running into on those:
- A tab opening behind the window on the first click, every time
- The real download link placed under a larger ad shaped like a download button
- Notification permission prompts on load
- Files that turned out to be a re-encode of a low bitrate stream, so a "320kbps" download that sounded worse than the source
- One that handed me a .exe instead of an .mp3, which is the point where I stopped experimenting
If you do use a site like that, my one rule is that the file you get should end in .mp3 or .m4a and nothing else. No installer, no zip, no "download manager".
About the 320kbps thing
This trips people up, so it is worth saying plainly. YouTube does not store a 320kbps master of the audio. What it serves is usually somewhere around 128 to 160kbps, in AAC or Opus.
When a converter offers you a 320kbps MP3, it is taking that source and encoding it into a larger file. The file size goes up. The audio does not get better, because the detail was already gone before the converter touched it. Nothing on the internet can recover it.
So why pick 320 at all? One real reason: re-encoding always loses a little, and a higher bitrate loses less of what is left. If you are archiving something, take the higher setting. If you are filling a phone, 128 or 192 sounds the same and takes a third of the space. Anyone promising CD quality from a YouTube link is selling you a bigger file, not a better one.
Beyond MP3
A few jobs that come up often enough to mention:
Playlists. yt-dlp and Seal both take a playlist URL and work through it. In the browser, use a page built for it rather than pasting the playlist link into a normal converter, which usually grabs only the first video.
WAV. If the audio is going into a video edit or a DAW, take WAV rather than MP3 so you are not stacking two lossy encodes. It is a much bigger file. Only worth it if something else is going to process the audio afterwards.
Shorts. They are ordinary videos with a different URL shape, and all three tools handle them. The only annoyance is the vertical thumbnail, which some converters will squash into a square cover.
Video rather than audio. All three do MP4. If you want it playing on an iPhone afterwards, take the H.264 option rather than the highest resolution on offer, because some 4K streams use a codec that iOS refuses to play and you will not find out until the file is on the phone.
The legal bit, briefly
Downloading video is against YouTube's terms of service unless there is a download button in the app itself. Separately from that, most music on YouTube belongs to somebody, and keeping a copy of it is a different question again depending on where you live.
What I download is my own uploads, Creative Commons material, public domain recordings, podcasts whose creators say go ahead, and things I already own. That is not legal advice, it is just what I do. Make your own call, but make it knowingly.
Questions I get asked
Which is the best free YouTube to MP3 converter?
For file quality and reliability, yt-dlp, and it is not particularly close. For the least effort, a browser tool. Most people asking the question want the second answer.
Is it safe to use online YouTube MP3 sites?
The conversion itself is harmless. The risk is what the page wraps around it. A site that opens tabs you did not click, or hands you anything other than a media file, is one to close.
What about iPhone?
There is no good App Store option, because Apple does not allow these apps. Use a browser tool in Safari and save the file to Files, then add it to your music app from there.
Can I download a whole playlist at once?
Yes with yt-dlp and Seal. In the browser, use a playlist specific page, and expect it to take a while, because it is fetching each video in turn.
Why did my download suddenly stop working?
Usually YouTube changed something on their end. Every tool on this list breaks for a day or two when that happens, then gets patched. If a site has been broken for weeks, it has been abandoned.
Where I actually land
yt-dlp on the desktop when I am archiving something or grabbing a long file. The browser tool for a single song, or when I am on a machine I cannot install things on. Seal on the phone because the share sheet saves me from ever typing a URL on a touchscreen.
Three tools, no ad tabs between me and the file. If you have found another one that clears that bar, drop it in the comments, I will test it.