> i wonder how it would work out if a bot used youtube-dl to snarf audio tracks.

youtube-dl + ffmpeg was the "traditional" way of doing it, but it didn't scale very well. These days, the majority of bots use lavaplayer[0] based solutions like lavalink[1] to stream audio.

There's also YouTube IP bans to be concerned about. Most bots get around it by rotating through blocks of IPv6 addresses.

[0] https://github.com/sedmelluq/lavaplayer

[1] https://github.com/freyacodes/Lavalink

That would be awful. Youtube-dl feels like Slsk to me. As long as its under-the-radar enough, the big dogs will let it live. That it's a CLI tool is enough to deter most users. If somebody creates a GUI app for it however, I imagine it would be snuffed out quickly.

youtube-dl already has a gui app.

I wasn't aware of that. I know about NewPipe which is almost certainly using the API. But not a desktop app.

NewPipe isn't using YouTube-DL. There's a GUI for desktop platforms, and DVD on Android. They know about it plenty. It's still not going anywhere until and unless they add DRM to YouTube. Which I could see happening in a few years.

It would pretty much guarantee that YouTube would kill youtube-dl access.

The music content industry is very aggressive with using legal pressure to make sure they get their dime.

This is exactly what I made last night so I hope not!