YouTube is a very popular media platform. It hosts a countless amount of videos, and many more are uploaded every day. But all of this content is only available when you’re online. This is hardly surprising; no computer will be able to hold such a massive amount of data. Downloading the entire YouTube video library for offline use is simply not feasible.
Still, it is possible to download videos from YouTube; many third-party tools are available for this purpose. But what if you want to download a playlist from YouTube on Mac? Such a thing is possible too. You can, of course, download each video individually, but some advanced programs can automate this process.
In the guide below, we will describe several ways to download a playlist from YouTube on Mac. Reading it will take only a few minutes of your time.
Download a playlist from YouTube on Mac with YouTube Multi Downloader
This is the simplest, but also the most time-consuming method available. The idea is that you simply download one video after another using one of many YouTube downloader tools. Although this is hardly a fun way to spend your time, this method does not require you to spend money or learn anything new.
The best tool to use for this purpose is YouTube Multi Downloader. It will provide you with download links for each video in a channel or a playlist, though you will still have to save each one individually.
Download a playlist from YouTube on Mac with 4K Video Downloader
4K Video Downloader is a fairly advanced application with many complex features. Most importantly, it can download entire playlists and even channels automatically, but it can also download subtitles and import/export data from spreadsheets so that you can see and manage what’s downloaded more easily. However, this comes at a price – quite literally. 4K Video Downloader is a paid program; its free version is in fact limited to only 30 downloads per day and cannot download more than 10 videos automatically. To lift these restrictions, you will have to pay $15 or $45, depending on how many features you need.
You can learn more about 4K Video Downloader on its website. You can download the free version or pay for the full version from there, too.
Download a playlist from YouTube on Mac with Youtube-DL
Youtube-DL is a very powerful program. It has more features than 4K Video Downloader and it’s completely free, too. But there is, unfortunately, a catch. It doesn’t have a graphical user interface, so it can only be used by typing in commands.
That said, Youtube-DL really does have a lot of features: it can automatically download playlists, or parts of playlists, or entire channels, just like 4K Video Downloader, but it can also exclude certain videos while doing so. You can choose to only download videos that have a certain amount of views or comments, videos that were uploaded within a certain time range, videos that have a certain word in their names. It can download subtitles, video descriptions, automatically attempt to bypass geographic restrictions on videos, and more.
So if you need to download vidoes from YouTube in bulk, and do so intelligently, Youtube-DL might be worth learning. Although it is a difficult program to use, the automation abilities it provides are unparalleled. Youtube-DL’s page on GitHub is a good place to start if you’re already familiar with using the command line. Otherwise, you can use a guide, such as this one, that will walk you through the entire process.
