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Comment by abakker | Hacker News Reader

And, even as a YouTube red subscriber, I like YouTube DL because it lets me create local Copies of music from great concerts. Many artists release a lot more great live stuff than there are albums for.

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What I learned is if you a find concert or something else you’d like to rewatch in the future - download it. Even if it’s legit video on legit yt channel, it could dissapear for number of reasona. And it’s not like - we’re taking it down from yt but you can watch it here for $5 or subscription or whatever. You typically can’t find it anywhere anymore.

That's happened to me so many times I started obsessively downloading the stuff I like. I must be on the way to becoming a data hoarder by now. It's just so incredibly aggravating, the video was right there a day ago and now it's gone. Feels like getting gaslighted. It's sad in an existential way too. The universe worked so hard to create that data and now it's just gone? Not if I can help it.

Comments like these always remind me of a particular time in the early 2010's when I was into 90's UK DnB. Good Looking Records had a bunch of songs published on their channel. I had a playlist with dozens of songs I've enjoyed and couldn't find anywhere else at the time. Then one day, poof all gone.

Granted, since then, a bunch of older DnB songs from this label resurfaced on YouTube, uploaded by various users. But it was a pretty dry couple of years for me. I was only able to find a couple of songs for sale on Discogs at the time, and many more lost because once deleted not even the artist/song name showed up in my playlist so I didn't know what to look for.

> once deleted not even the artist/song name showed up in my playlist so I didn't know what to look for.

This is the worst part of all. It’s a memory hole, and feels like gaslighting to the end user.

Search on discogs for that label.

This. I use it to download music that is not for sale because they are either original content of small artists or they are covera and instrumentals; even if they fall under fair use, they can disappear forever and for no good reason.

There's a particular video I wanted to watch yesterday that I only remembered the title and that I loved it a decade ago. After 20 minutes of searching I found it was deleted, and the only way I could watch it was a random archive.org snapshot of the YouTube page.

First thing I did was download it and upload it somewhere else.

Doesn't that include YouTube Music which gives you the same live music videos and let you store them offline?

e.g. https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=YQfkm4Vp-1o&list=PLZGh95p3...

Store them offline in the YouTube app that deletes them from your device if the original is taken down, yes.

And if you don't mind my asking, what's the most practical/useful way to download videos from YT without using spammy 3d party websites?

Uhh, how about youtube-dl?

Youtube-dlc works much better currently

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