Save YouTube audio and video on your Mac.

One click from any video. Best quality, playlists you pick from, and no ads or pop-ups, ever. Tapedeck runs on your own computer, so nothing is uploaded anywhere.

$ brew install songbachhoang/tap/tapedeck

Then run tapedeck. Free and open source. Needs Homebrew.

Tapedeck showing a playlist of 17 Blender open movies, each with a checkbox, and a button to download them as a zip

Everything a downloader should do

One click from YouTube

Drag the Tapedeck button to your bookmarks bar. On any video, click it and the download starts.

Best quality

Keep the original audio with no re-encoding, or get MP3, M4A, 1080p MP4 or 4K video. Cover art included.

Playlists, your pick

See every track first, tick the ones you want, and get one tidy, numbered .zip.

Fast

Downloads three tracks at once, straight from your own connection.

Keeps working

YouTube changes all the time. Tapedeck updates its download engine, yt-dlp, by itself every day.

Private and open source

No account, no tracking, no uploads. Read every line on GitHub.

How it works

  1. Install

    One Homebrew command installs Tapedeck along with ffmpeg and everything else it needs.

  2. Open

    Run tapedeck. It opens in your browser, but everything happens on your Mac.

  3. Download

    Paste a link or use the one-click button. Your file lands in Downloads.

Questions

Is it free?

Yes. Tapedeck is free and open source under the MIT license.

Why an app and not a website?

Download websites are full of ads and fake buttons, and YouTube blocks them often. Tapedeck downloads from your own connection, so it's clean, fast and reliable.

Does it work on Windows or Linux?

Tapedeck is made for macOS. It runs on Linux with Python, ffmpeg and Deno installed. Windows isn't supported yet.

What can I download?

Download videos you own, that are Creative Commons or public domain, or that you have permission to save. Downloading may be against YouTube's Terms of Service, so use Tapedeck responsibly.