Using PowerShell and youtube-dl to automate grunt work

Earlier this evening I was tasked by my wife to create audio files from some (DRM-free) YouTube content. I knew how to do this via a manual process, however after the 5th manual file conversion I started to remember the youtube-dl Python project and figured there has to be an easier and quicker way to do this file conversion grunt work.

And sure enough... youtube-dl (with some help from PowerShell) does the trick.

Expected input and output

For starters (we are assuming you have already installed Python 3), you will need to have pip install two modules:

 pip install youtube-dl  
 pip install ffmpeg  

Next, create a youtube-uris.txt with the URI of each song you want to convert on separate lines of the file.

Finally, you can use the following PowerShell script to copy the song URIs into a string array which is then iterated through, converting each array item into a playable audio file (mp4), saved in whatever directory you run the script from.

 [string[]]$arrayFromFile = Get-Content -Path 'C:\sand\youtube-dl-sandbox\youtube-uris.txt'  
 foreach ($uri in $arrayFromFile) {  
   youtube-dl -f 140 $uri  
  }  

That's it. This script can be used for automating other manual/repetitive tasks requiring a procedure to be run against every item in a large list.


Reference: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl