[youtube-dl][1] is a versatile command line tool for downloading videos from YouTube and many other websites. I use it for making back up of my own YouTube videos.
By default, you [use youtube-dl for downloading videos][2]. How about extracting only the audio with youtubde-dl? That’s very simple actually. Let me show you the steps.
Attention
Downloading videos from websites could be against their policies. It’s up to you if you choose to download videos or audio.
### Download only audio with youtube-dl
Please make sure that you have installed youtube-dl on your Linux distribution first.
```
sudo snap install youtube-dl
```
If you only want to download audio from a YouTube video, you can use the -x option with youtube-dl. This extract-audio option converts the video files to audio-only files.
```
youtube-dl -x video_URL
```
The file is saved in the same directory from where you ran the youtube-dl command.
Here’s an example where I downloaded the voice-over of our Zorin OS 16 review video.
That scary looking `-o "%(title)s.%(ext)s"` specifies the output file (with option -o) and instructs it to use the title of the video and the extension (mp3 in this case) for naming the audio files.
![][6]
I hope you find this quick tip helpful. Enjoy the audio files :)
