YouTube Music Downloader

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on September 11, 2012

You may have noticed that many YouTube videos are actually music with some kind of visual accompaniment added, such as still image slideshows, cover art, psychedelic effects, and a particular favorite, a video camera pointed at a spinning turntable. You can download and save tunes from YouTube with the greatest of ease with YouTube Music Downloader -- videos, too. This free tool makes it easy to grab and save YouTube files to play later, share with your friends, and do the other things you can do with freely available content. But YouTube Music Downloader lets you quickly choose your audio output quality from a drop-down menu, which saves tons of time in two important ways: it eliminates the need to convert the raw download to your chosen format and bit rate, and it makes the job quick and easy enough that you'll actually save that song instead of just thinking about it. By the time you've hemmed and hawed, you could be done with the download.

YouTube Music Downloader's interface is pretty basic, which goes with the territory: fields for Video URL and Save To (destination folder) as well as the previously mentioned drop-down menu, which changes its options between audio and video formats when you check either MP3/Music or Video. A Status bar tracks the job; a check box tells the program to delete videos after conversion. A Skin button has Hue and Saturation sliders that can produce any interface color you'd like. Clicking Update informed us that ours was the program's latest version. That's all there is to YouTube Music Downloader's controls, except a Help button that accesses basic Web resources.

We browsed to YouTube, searched for a familiar tune, and copied its link from the search results. We pasted the URL into YouTube Music Downloader, selected our format (which depends on availability), and pressed Download and Convert (actually, "Download and Convert!" but we kept our powder dry until the results were in). The job completed in a few seconds. YouTube Music Downloader not only grabbed the tune but the cover art as well. The results more than earned the exclamation mark!