How to Download Audio from YouTube on iPhone (Free)

Most of the time you do not want the video. You want the two hour interview to listen to on a flight, the lecture your professor uploaded, the mix you want in your gym playlist, or the audio from a talk you gave that only exists on someone else’s channel.

Carrying a 900 MB video file around to hear a voice is silly, and YouTube does not offer an audio only save unless you are paying.

I am going to cover three routes here, in the order I would actually try them. Two of them are entirely Apple’s own tools and cost nothing extra. Before that, one honest paragraph, because this topic attracts a lot of guides that skip it.

The part most guides leave out

YouTube’s terms of service do not permit downloading content unless a download button is offered in the service itself. That is their rule, and no Shortcut, site or app changes it. What I can tell you is where the line sits in practice.

Content you are clearly entitled to save includes your own uploads, videos published under a Creative Commons licence, which YouTube marks in the description, and anything a creator has explicitly said you may reuse. Podcasts that also publish an RSS feed are better fetched from the feed anyway. Recordings of your own talks, your own band, your own lectures, same thing.

Content you are not entitled to redistribute is everything else. Saving a song to keep instead of buying it is copyright infringement whatever the tooling looks like, and I am not going to write a guide that pretends otherwise.

I went through the full reasoning in is it legal to download YouTube videos for personal use, and it is worth five minutes if this is something you do often.

Route one: YouTube’s own offline audio

If the content you want is music or a podcast, the official route may already do what you need, and it is the only one that is unambiguously within the rules.

YouTube Premium adds a download button under any video, saved for offline playback inside the YouTube app, and it has a background play mode so audio keeps going with your screen off. YouTube Music does the same for tracks and playlists.

The catch is obvious: it is a paid subscription, the files stay locked inside the app, and you cannot drop them into a Voice Memos style playlist, a video edit or a car stereo USB stick.

If you only want to listen with headphones on the train, this is the cleanest answer and you can stop reading. If you need an actual audio file you can move around, keep going.

Route two: extract the audio from a video you already have

This is the one that runs entirely on your iPhone, with no website involved at any point, and it is my preferred method whenever the video is already on my phone.

Say you have your own recording, a video someone AirDropped you, or a clip you saved earlier. iOS ships an audio extraction action inside Shortcuts, which is exactly what Grabio’s Extract Audio tool uses under the hood.

1. Install Grabio once, from Safari on your iPhone.
2. Open Photos or Files and find the video.
3. Tap Share, scroll the bottom row of the share sheet, and tap Grabio.
4. Choose Extract Audio from the menu.
5. The audio track is pulled out and saved to Files. No upload, no signal needed, works in airplane mode.

Because Apple’s own actions are doing the work, this is fast and the audio is a straight copy of the track that was inside the video rather than a re recording. Full walkthrough with the edge cases is in extracting audio from a video on iPhone.

The output lands as an M4A file, which is the format iOS is happiest with. It plays in Files, in Music once imported, in Voice Memos, and in every mainstream desktop player. If something you use insists on MP3, that is one more share sheet step, covered in converting audio to MP3 on iPhone.

Route three: the share sheet, for a link

When the material is a public YouTube link you are entitled to save, the flow looks like this.

1. In the YouTube app, tap Share under the video, then Copy link. Or in Safari, tap the share icon in the toolbar.
2. Tap Grabio in the share sheet, or paste the link into Safari and share from there.
3. Grabio opens a clean, ad free downloader page with the link already loaded.
4. Where the page offers an audio only option, pick it. That gives you a much smaller file than downloading the video and stripping it afterwards.
5. Tap download. The file goes into Files, under On My iPhone then Downloads.

To be clear about what is happening: Grabio does not fetch YouTube media itself, and no file passes through my server. Apple’s Shortcuts actions cannot resolve a YouTube link into a media URL, so something external has to.

What the Shortcut controls is which page you land on, so you get one without fake download buttons and pop up ads. The full explanation of that handoff is in how Grabio works, and the video version of this same flow is in downloading YouTube videos on iPhone.

If the page only offers video, download the smallest video quality on offer and then run route two on the saved file. You end up in the same place with one extra step.

Getting the audio into a place you can actually use it

A file sitting in the Downloads folder is not much use if you want it in your headphones on a run. Three things worth knowing.

Playing it from Files works fine. Tap the file and it plays with a scrubber and lock screen controls. Good enough for a single lecture.

Getting it into the Music app means syncing through a Mac or PC, because the Music app on iOS does not import arbitrary files from Files. This is a genuine iOS limitation and it annoys me too.

Most people are better off with a player that reads the Files app directly. Any of the third party audio players that support the Files browser will see your Downloads folder and treat it as a library, which skips the sync problem entirely.

Trimming before you keep it

Long recordings usually have five minutes of sponsor read and setup before the part you care about. Trim first and you save both storage and the irritation of scrubbing every time you listen.

If the source was a video, trim the video before extracting the audio. Trimming a video on iPhone without an app covers the yellow handle drag in Photos, which takes about fifteen seconds and runs on device. Extract afterwards and your audio file starts exactly where you wanted it.

Why I keep the Shortcut free

Every audio downloader I tried before building this either wanted a subscription for something Apple already does for free, or served three interstitial ads on the way to a file. The conversion work here is genuinely being done by actions Apple ships with iOS. Charging a monthly fee to point at them felt wrong.

So Grabio stays free, there is no login, and the on device tools work offline. It is one Apple Shortcut sitting in your share sheet, and you can open it in the Shortcuts app and read every action it runs before you trust it. Get the Shortcut if that sounds better than the App Store option.

Frequently asked questions

Can I download audio from YouTube on iPhone for free?

You can extract audio for free from any video already stored on your iPhone, using Apple’s own Shortcuts actions, with nothing uploaded. For material still on YouTube, the officially sanctioned free option is limited to what YouTube itself offers, and full offline audio requires a Premium subscription. Anything else depends on you having the right to save that specific recording.

What format does the extracted audio come out in?

M4A, which is Apple’s preferred container and plays natively across iOS, macOS, Windows and Android. It is smaller than WAV and generally better quality than MP3 at the same bitrate. If a piece of software you use only accepts MP3, one extra share sheet step converts it, and the quality difference is not audible for speech.

Is downloading YouTube audio legal?

It depends entirely on the content. Your own uploads, Creative Commons licensed videos and material a creator has permitted you to reuse are fine. Commercial music and copyrighted video are not, regardless of the tool. YouTube’s terms also prohibit downloading outside their own features, which is a contract question separate from copyright.

Does extracting audio reduce the sound quality?

No. Extraction copies the existing audio track out of the video container rather than re encoding it, so what you get is exactly what was inside the file. Quality is only lost if you convert to a lossy format afterwards at a lower bitrate, or if you screen record instead of extracting.

Where does the audio file save on my iPhone?

In the Files app, under On My iPhone, in either the Downloads folder or the Shortcuts folder depending on which route you used. Audio does not go to the Photos app, since Photos only holds images and video. You can move it anywhere in Files by pressing and holding it and choosing Move.

Can I do this without any app at all?

Almost. The Shortcuts app is required, but it is pre installed on every iPhone since iOS 16 and is made by Apple. Grabio is a Shortcut file that runs inside it, so there is no App Store download, no account and no background process. Screen recording plus audio extraction is another route that uses nothing beyond what shipped with your phone.