pluck

Download high quality music from YouTube Music.

Search or paste a link. Tracks, albums, videos (audio only). Get 256 kbps AAC audio files with album art + proper tagging.

Note

While pluck works without YT Premium (or without a YT account), 256kbps AAC streams are only available to Premium subscribers. In case a YT Premium session cookie isn't supplied, pluck will fall back to 160kbps Opus streams and transcode them.

Why not just use yt-dlp?

YT Music's catalog splits into two halves: music videos on youtube.com (which yt-dlp), and dedicated streaming-only tracks reserved for Premium accounts. pluck exists to support and prioritize dedicated streaming-only tracks which are natively higher-quality AAC. This also avoids a lossy Opus→AAC/mp3 re-encode. Not to mention music videos often have intros/interludes which dedicated streaming tracks don't.

Install

uv tool install git+https://github.com/arshzip/pluck

or from a clone: uv tool install --editable . — both put pluck on PATH. Needs ffmpeg.

Setup auth for YT Premium

On first launch, pluck will prompt you to either paste a cookie or launch a temporary Chrome profile where you can sign in for pluck to automatically fetch and store your cookie.

You can also refresh the cookie by running pluck login.

Usage

• paste a music.youtube.com link to a track or an album (several at once works too)
• search and pick from the top results
• paste the path to a .txt file with links
• files are named Artist - Title.m4a and saved to your download_dir (~/Downloads/Pluck by default)

Config

• ~/.pluck/config.json stores your auth cookie and download_dir (where downloads are saved).

Notes

depends on yt-dlp + ytmusicapi + ffmpeg + mutagen.