Downie makes it easy to download YouTube videos on your computer
We’ve all been there, you find a YouTube video you love and you want an easy way to save it to your computer. Or maybe, you found an amazing live recording from a band you like and just want to save the audio without the video. The latter situation is one I’ve found myself in time and time again and until recently I never had a good way download YouTube videos to my computer. Through my Setapp subscription (which is like a Netflix for Mac apps) I stumbled across an app called Downie.
Downie makes it extremely simple to download YouTube videos to your computer–all you need is the URL of the YouTube video(s) you want to save to your computer and Downie will start downloading. With Downie you can easily download HD YouTube videos with support for up to 4K. In my tests using Downie, videos downloaded fast and without any issues. You can even have Downie convert the downloaded videos to MP4 format so they will play in iTunes right away.
Getting started using Downie
There are a few ways you can have Downie start downloading videos for you, the first way is you can drag a link from any browser either on Downie‘s window, or the icon in the Dock. Additionally, if you have more links, or links within some text, just drop the whole thing onto Downie – it will scan the text for links. Or lastly, you can use copy and paste – just press Command-O in Downie and you can insert as many links as you want in a single go.
Download YouTube videos with Downie
I decided to try and download a TV show that aired in 2007 on ABC but that I couldn’t for the life of me find anywhere but on YouTube due to the fact it was canceled after one short 8 episode season–and it worked wonderfully. I was able to feed the URLs for each episode on YouTube of show (which is called Traveler in case you were curious to check it out) into Downie and away it went.
I also tested Downie by giving it a link to a music video and setting it to only extract the audio as an MP3. It worked perfectly and was definitely much easier than me having to use something like Audio Hijack to record the audio coming out of Google Chrome.
Final Thoughts
In addition to YouTube, Downie also has support for more than 1,000 different video sites making it extremely versatile and useful. Downie is an easy-to-use app that I would highly recommend to anyone looking for a simple way to download YouTube videos onto their computer. The app is available for $20 stand-alone or you can get access to it (and many other apps) via Setapp.