Generally, one opens a web browser or an app to use YouTube. However, if you’re looking to just listen to the audio, you can actually do that right from the terminal. You just need Shellbeats from [lalo-space].
Shellbeats is primarily intended for playing music from YouTube, and is well equipped for this task. It allows searching YouTube directly from the terminal, as well as streaming tracks or entire playlists from the command line interface. You can also make and edit playlists from within the tool, and even download the whole lot as MP3s if so desired. It’s all keyboard-operated and nicely lightweight. The overall experience isn’t dissimilar from operating a simple LCD-based MP3 player from 20 years ago.
There’s plenty of other fun stuff you can do in the terminal, too, as we’ve explored previously. If you’re working on your own media player hacks, be sure to notify us on the tipsline!
Additionally, if you only want to listen to a single URL, installing yt-dlp and mpv work very well. I wrote a bash function to make it even easier:
ytmusic(){ # Stream the audio from a YouTube video
echo
echo “Connecting to YouTube and opening audio stream…”
mpv –no-video “$1”
echo
}
Now I can get adverts directly to my terminal, what a time to be alive
It uses yt-dlp under the hood, so I assume there are no ads.
Why aren’t you using Firefox with uBlock Origin ad blocker? Kills ads dead. I never see ads on YouTube or most of the internet.
People are always bitching about ads everywhere and I’m like “What ads? Oh, yeah. All the ones I never see.”
It seems like people would rather complain than do something about it.
Didn’t you hear? Firefox is dead. All the cool kids are using (insert browser flavor of the month here).
Meanwhile, Firefox remains the better alternative.