Skip to main content

Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://mintlify.com/mr-sunset/youtube-rip/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

YouTube Rip is a lightweight AppleScript application for macOS that lets you save any YouTube video’s audio as an MP3 file directly to your Downloads folder. This page explains what the tool is, how it works under the hood, and what you need to run it.

​
What is YouTube Rip?

YouTube Rip is a single AppleScript file that presents a simple GUI dialog — no Terminal window, no command-line flags to remember. You paste a YouTube URL, click OK, and the audio is downloaded and converted to MP3 automatically. Behind the scenes it delegates all the heavy lifting to yt-dlp, the actively maintained fork of youtube-dl, which is installed via Homebrew. Because it is plain AppleScript, there is nothing to compile or package. You open the .applescript file in macOS Script Editor and run it directly — or save it as a compiled .scpt or .app bundle for one-click access from your Dock or Finder.

​
How it works

When you run the script, three things happen in sequence:
  1. URL prompt — A native macOS dialog titled “YouTube Rip” appears, pre-filled with https://youtu.be/, and asks you to enter or paste a video URL. It uses the GenericSpeaker.icns system icon.
  2. yt-dlp invocation — The script calls yt-dlp via do shell script, passing -x --audio-format mp3 to extract and convert audio, -P "$HOME/Downloads" to set the output directory, and --extractor-args "youtube:player_client=default,-android_sdkless" to avoid common 403 errors from YouTube’s API.
  3. Result dialog — A second dialog displays the raw shell stdout from yt-dlp so you can confirm the download completed and see the saved filename. It uses the BurningIcon.icns system icon.
The script also prepends /opt/homebrew/bin and /usr/local/bin to the shell PATH before invoking yt-dlp, ensuring Homebrew-installed binaries are found even though macOS GUI apps do not inherit the standard shell environment.

​
Prerequisites

Before running YouTube Rip, make sure you have:
  • macOS on an Apple Silicon (M-series) Mac. Intel Macs may also work — the script includes /usr/local/bin (the default Intel Homebrew prefix) in its PATH.
  • Homebrew — the macOS package manager used to install yt-dlp.
  • yt-dlp — installed via Homebrew (brew install yt-dlp).

​
Next steps

Installation

Install Homebrew, yt-dlp, and get the YouTube Rip script set up on your Mac.

Quickstart

Run YouTube Rip for the first time and download your first MP3 in minutes.

Build docs developers (and LLMs) love

Get started for freeTalk to us