How to Download Audio File from YouTube on iPhone

Somebody uploads a two hour lecture, a set from a festival, an interview, and you want the sound of it on your phone for a commute with no signal. YouTube on iPhone gives you a video player and nothing that resembles a file.

Search for a way to fix that and you get a wall of sites that all look like they were designed in 2011 and want you to click a button labelled Download that is not the download button.

I built Grabio, a free iPhone Shortcut, and this is one of the topics where I am going to spend most of the post telling you which routes are legitimate and which are not, because that distinction matters more than the tapping.

There are four ways to end up with audio from YouTube on an iPhone. Two are clean, one is limited, and one depends entirely on what you are downloading and why.

First, what the rules actually say

YouTube’s terms of service ask you not to download content except through features YouTube itself provides. That is a contract between you and YouTube, and it is separate from copyright law, which is about the person who made the thing.

A lecture released under a Creative Commons licence and a major label music video are treated very differently by copyright even though they sit on the same site.

I wrote a longer piece on where the line sits in is it legal to download YouTube videos for personal use. The short version I work to: if the creator has given permission, if it is your own upload, or if the licence explicitly allows it, go ahead. If the answer is “it is on the internet so it is mine”, it is not.

I am not going to write instructions for pulling audio out of paid or DRM protected services here. Those exist elsewhere and they are somebody else’s problem.

The supported route: YouTube’s own offline playback

YouTube Premium lets you download a video for offline playback inside the YouTube app, and on a Premium plan you also get background audio playback with the screen off, which is what most people asking this question actually want.

The catch is that the download is not a file. It lives inside the app in an encrypted store, it expires if you do not reconnect periodically, and you cannot move it to Files, put it in a playlist app, or send it to anybody.

If you want the thing playing in your pocket on a plane, this is the least effort option and it is fully within the rules. If you want a file you own, it does nothing for you.

The clean route to a real file: your own uploads

If the video is yours, YouTube hands it back without any argument. Open YouTube Studio, find the video, and use the download option in its menu. You get an MP4 of what you uploaded.

From there, extracting the audio is a solved problem on iPhone and it happens on a file you already have. Save the MP4 into Files, run Grabio, and pick the extract audio option. It reads the video and writes out the soundtrack.

If you need a specific container, Grabio also does an M4A conversion, and I covered the full sequence in extracting audio from a video on iPhone. For MP3 specifically, converting audio to MP3 on iPhone walks through what actually changes when you convert and what you lose.

Free music you are allowed to download

This one surprises people. YouTube runs an Audio Library for creators, full of tracks that are cleared for use, with the download button right there. If you were searching for audio to put behind a video of your own, that library is the correct answer and it skips the entire ethical mess.

It is easiest to reach from YouTube Studio on a desktop browser, and Safari on iPhone can get there with the desktop site requested from the aA menu in the address bar.

Separately, plenty of YouTube videos carry a Creative Commons licence, which the uploader chose and which appears in the video description. That licence generally permits reuse with attribution. A creator who has picked it has said in advance that they are fine with you having the file.

Podcasts are the other easy win. Almost every podcast that publishes to YouTube also publishes an RSS feed, and Apple Podcasts will download episodes as proper files with one tap. If the thing you want is a conversation, look for the feed before you look for a downloader.

Where the third party tools sit

Grabio’s menu includes handoffs to outside sites such as cobalt.tools and vert.sh. Grabio does not fetch anything from YouTube itself. It opens the site with you already halfway there, so you are not typing a long address on a phone keyboard.

Whether using one of those sites is appropriate depends entirely on what you point it at, and that is a decision I cannot make for you from a blog post.

My own rule is that I use them for my own material, for Creative Commons material, and for things where the creator has said publicly that they do not mind. That is a narrower band than most people want, and I would rather be straight about it than write a cheerful guide that pretends the question does not exist.

Those sites also break constantly. They get blocked, they change domains, they go down for a fortnight. Any post claiming a specific downloader will always work is out of date by the time you read it.

Once you have the file

Audio from a video source lands as whatever container the source used, and the app you want to play it in may be fussy. The three fixes that cover almost everything:

• Extract audio when you have a video and want only the sound. Grabio does this on a file you select.
• Convert to M4A when you want something Apple’s apps handle without complaint. Converting an audio file to M4A covers the details.
• Convert to MP3 when the destination is an old car stereo, a Windows machine, or anything that has not been updated since 2015.

If your actual goal was music rather than speech, downloading SoundCloud tracks on iPhone is worth a read, because a lot of artists publish there with downloads deliberately switched on. That is permission stated in advance, which is the cleanest signal you will get anywhere.

Where the file ends up

Audio files do not go to Photos. Photos only accepts images and video, so an M4A or MP3 lands in Files, usually under On My iPhone in whichever folder you chose during the save step. If a file seems to have vanished, open Files and check Recents before assuming the conversion failed.

From Files you can share it into a music app, attach it to an email, or drop it into a cloud folder. The Files app is also where you rename it, which matters more than it sounds when you have four downloads all called video.

What I would do

For listening on a commute, pay for Premium and use offline mode. It is the least friction and it is above board. For a file you keep, work from your own uploads, Creative Commons videos, the Audio Library, or a podcast feed, and let Grabio do the extraction and conversion once you have the video in hand.

Get the Shortcut if the extraction and conversion half is the part you keep getting stuck on.

Questions I get asked

Can I download YouTube audio without any app on my iPhone?

You can avoid App Store installs entirely. Apple’s Shortcuts app is already on the phone and Safari handles the rest. Grabio runs as a Shortcut, so nothing new gets installed, though the actual fetching still happens on outside websites rather than inside the Shortcut.

Is downloading audio from YouTube against the terms of service?

Downloading outside YouTube’s own offline feature goes against YouTube’s terms. Copyright is a separate question that depends on the licence the uploader chose. Your own videos, Creative Commons licensed videos, and the YouTube Audio Library are the cases where both questions have a clear answer.

Why can I not save a YouTube Premium download to Files?

Premium offline downloads are stored inside the YouTube app in a protected form so that they only play there. They expire without a periodic connection and there is no export. It is playback access rather than a file you own.

What format should I pick for listening on an iPhone?

M4A is the natural fit, since it is what Apple’s own apps produce and consume. Pick MP3 only when the file is going somewhere old or somewhere you do not control, such as a car stereo or a shared Windows machine, because MP3 plays on essentially everything.

How do I get the audio out of a video I already have?

Save the video into Files or Photos, run Grabio, and choose the extract audio option, then pick the video. It writes the soundtrack out as a separate file and leaves the original alone. That step works the same whether the video came from your camera, a colleague, or your own YouTube channel.

Do any of these routes cost money?

Grabio is free with no account and no paid version. YouTube Premium costs money, and it is the only one of these that does. The Audio Library, Creative Commons videos, and downloading your own uploads from YouTube Studio are all free.