If you have ever been frustrated that there is never a convenient way to store your favourite YouTube song other than making a playlist – you are in luck!
There happens to be a way to download and convert videos in an easy way and this text will go through the details on how it is possible on any personal computer.
No longer will you need to worry about precious mobile data while going outside for a walk and listening to music at the same time.
Having a YouTube playlist ready for a special occasion, be it a party or hyping yourself for a physical exercise or even just for your own leisure is great and YouTube has an enormous number of videos to choose from and a relatively easy way to arrange them.
But what bugs most of us is not the range of options we have there but the interruptions. Ads that pop up with a completely different music background, buffering in the middle of the song (right when you were singing along the chorus) or just long loading times between two videos…
A Solution Is A Solution
A temporary solution to that is going offline and hoping that your cache memory has stored that one short video you were watching, although it is a very slim chance for that.
Better yet – going offline and having everything there for you, the whole playlist, that you can browse through uninterrupted.
But considering the site does not have an offline mode whatsoever we need to delve deeper into the rabbit hole.
It seems that the best possible option that remains is downloading beforehand the material you wish to use later on. What you need to be aware of is that most of this material, videos especially, take up a huge amount of memory space and some older devices may have trouble playing them smoothly, so a viable option is converting to MP3 and then storing it. This would give you a good database of music or audio books to choose from and it would all be easily accessible by any type of music player.
To do all of this you would need to consider several things first:
- internet speed
- web browser version you are using
- storage and
- readability
Technical Necessities
To use and download from YouTube in any reasonable time you would need a certain internet speed.
On their Google support site they give a list of various speeds you would need normally, without buffering, watch videos of different quality, from 360p do 4K HD. As is evident, you need at least 500 Kbps to use any content and it would be best to have a stronger connection if you are to download and convert it later.
You also need the latest version of a web browser, one that has the needed support for YouTube to function normally.
This should be of little concern as they are usually updated instantly when you are connected to the internet. MS Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari etc are all good options as this site is supported on all of them.
Another key thing is storage capacity.
While a single song as an MP3 file is not large, having a whole discography can eat away the available Mb of space. Most hard disks today will have enough memory to store whatever you need for a playlist, even if it has several hundred songs in it, but you can always buy external memory for that extra something, and it can be easily carried around. For example, a USB memory stick with a selection of someone’s favourite classical music is a fantastic gift for a birthday or Christmas.
Finally, readability here does not refer to reading in a literal sense but how your device can read the data from the disk and play it back to you.
MP3 files are instantly recognized on any modern and smart device so this should not pose a problem but you still need an audio output device to hear it.
Loudspeakers and headphones are what you are looking for and both devices come with their own pros and cons you should look into before purchasing.
So even though YouTube does not have an option to download any content from their website that is not really a problem any more.
This huge online server and database is fully accessible offline as well if you know how to do it with these simple instructions.
Storing and having at your disposal all the various artists, scientists, writers and speakers is what the world wide web is all about anyway.