Assumed audience: macOS and iOS users who listen to podcasts, audiobooks, etc., and who also sometimes watch YouTube videos or the like… and who might want to put those together somehow.
For years, I have used the command-line utility yt-dlp (previously youtube-dl) to download video from various sources (not just YouTube!) as audio streams 1 that I then upload using Overcast’s Uploads feature. This lets me listen to a lot of material otherwise only available in video form — and it turns out that many videos make for perfectly good audio content, especially if the presenter does a good job of making the video “channel” a kind of progressive enhancement to the “audio” channel — whether intentionally or otherwise! For example, many good conference talks fit this bill quite nicely.
This is one of Overcast’s few premium features, but I use it so much that this feature alone would be enough to get me to pay the $15/year subscription — never mind the developer’s consistent work to keep it fresh and powerful and even, a decade into its life, adding new features.
Recently, I discovered the excellent Downie app, which does the same thing yt-dlp does but in a far, far less fussy way. You open a webpage with a video on it in Safari with the Downie extension enabled, or in Downie’s built-in browser view (more on this in a moment), and simply choose what to download:
This is handy enough for snagging the regular YouTube video of a conference talk — certainly much nicer than doing the same with yt-dlp and trying to remember in particular what exact invocation is required to extract audio or trying to sort through the various streams listed in its output.2 The real magic, though, comes in when you want to snag a download from some other site where you may need to be logged in to access the video.
I don’t have piracy in mind here! You could obviously use this for that, but I don’t and I don’t think you should. The only way I am using this is for “context shifting”.
For example, I am working through the excellent Master the Marathon course offered (for free!) by 80/20 Endurance. Many weeks, I have attended the call. Other weeks, I have not been able to, though, but still wanted to catch up on the material. When better to do that, I thought the other day, than on a training run for a marathon? So I opened Downie, logged into the course, and selected the relevant stream. I told it to save only the audio, and renamed it to something useful, and when it finished, I uploaded it to Overcast, and: boom, multiple weeks that I had missed now in my ears as I ran!