Bdtyktl

Is it possible to keep a public YouTube playlist synced to a local folder as mp3 files?

Key characteristics:

• Add mp3 file to local folder, if new video is added to the playlist


• Delete mp3 file in local folder, if respective video is removed from the playlist

This is more of a workaround than a direct answer, but if you are ok with occasionally re-downloading some of the older playlist files you can set up a cronjob to find and delete files in a target directory using find.

You should review the playlist and estimate how long files usually stay on it before disappearing, and use that number of days for your variable. Here in my example I chose 30 days.

Here's an example Bash script for cron to run as an @daily job:

#! /bin/bash



# Delete all files in a directory older than 30 days

# (careful, this is recursive and will delete files in subdirectories)

find /PATH/TO/youtube-dl-playlist-files -mtime +30 -delete

Any files still on the playlist but older than 30 days will be deleted, and youtube-dl will re-download them when you run it next. This isn't optimal but it may be good enough.

You can either use this GitHub repo, which seems to do exactly what you want.

Or you can use plain youtube-dl with --download-archive, as seen in youtube-dl's man page, although this will not remove any videos:

How do I download only new videos from a playlist?

Use download-archive feature. With this feature you should initially download the complete playlist with --download-archive path/to/download/archive/file.txt that will record identifiers of all the videos in a special file. Each subsequent run with the same --download-archive will download only new videos and skip all videos that have been downloaded before. Note that only successful downloads are recorded in the file.

For example, at first,
youtube-dl --download-archive archive.txt "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwiyx1dc3P2JR9N8gQaQN_BCvlSlap7re"

will download the complete PLwiyx1dc3P2JR9N8gQaQN_BCvlSlap7re playlist and create a file archive.txt. Each subsequent run will only download new videos if any:
youtube-dl --download-archive archive.txt "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwiyx1dc3P2JR9N8gQaQN_BCvlSlap7re"