Are YouTube music downloads any good?

[DoctorDoodle19]

I understand downloading videos on YouTube are compressed and not good quality, but what about the “_____-topic” channels where it’s just someone’s music that was uploaded to streaming services and added to YouTube automatically, because of YouTube Music. Are these ones compressed? I’m thinking about making a library music mixtape, but I don't know if I can download music using a yt to wav app such as Cobalt or Wav Ninja to get those songs in good quality.

[nidostar]

My initial thought is that most if not all streaming services compress their music tracks in order to facilitate fast and efficient streaming. This website explains in some detail (www.ac3filter.net/does-youtube-music-compress-audio/).

I don't know the apps you refer to but surely you'd be upscaling a lossy file to WAV which is a big no-no? If the original file is a lossy one then there is nothing that can be done to improve the audio quality. All those apps are doing is simply changing the file name by placing a WAV suffix to it and increasing the size of the file. They aren't making any change to the audio data. That said if the music you download from YT is for playing in the car or as background at home then it's probably less critical if it's MP3 quality.

[Mr]

If I recall correctly YT Music doesn't offer any lossless alternatives - so all those 'youtube to wav' services are really just grabbing the lossy audio and converting it to .wav - the audio would still be lossy.

Lossless audio can be grabbed from other streaming services, however - I haven't tried this one myself, but I've heard squid.wtf works wonderfully for this exact purpose, for instance.

[DoctorDoodle19]

Ok. I just finished the mixtape I was working on, I used my usual methods for grabbing music from YouTube, as well as some lossless audio files, and I will post it soon. On the next mixtape, I’ll try something else.