I’m out most of the day and rarely have stable Wi-Fi. I also don’t have YouTube Premium (and I’m definitely not paying a monthly fee just to download a few videos). Streaming on mobile data over and over is getting old.

What I want is super simple:
I paste a YouTube link → it gives me a high-quality video with audio → done.
No video-only files, no sketchy installers, no weird “processing” loops.

I’ve tested a few tools so far—yt-dlp, powerful but not always convenient；4K Video Downloader, decent but sometimes rate-limited for me； and Keeprix, which honestly worked well for long videos. Still, I’m curious if there’s something even more reliable out there.

like a month ago all the downloaders stopped working. i dont have the money to pay for a service and none of the online ones are working anymore.
and yt dlp scares me i lowk dont know how to use that kind of thing.
i need it to go to either mp3 or m4a im not picky

currently the only way i've found to get music in high quality and not get rate-limited by a website is to play it while recording the output through audacity, and then trim and save the recordings. needless to say, it's a huge time sink.

i'd love to be able to convert and download videos directly on my computer, but i don't have the slightest bit of trust in any of those websites. does anyone know of any such program that isn't malware or spyware?

while we're here, is there also a mobile music player that can stream from another device's storage? so i don't have to also get them on my phone?