Jan 28, 2020 Apple has released macOS Big Sur. Version 11.0 (technically launching at 11.0.1), Big Sur is a substantial update to macOS that changes the look and feel of the entire system. The Notification Center and widgets have now merged into a single view, and elements like Control Center have come over from iOS, but with their own Mac spin. Download iTunes for Mac free. With iTunes in the Cloud, the music, apps, and books you purchase automatically appear on all your devices.

15 Best YouTube Video Downloader for Mac Big Sur/Catalina/Mojave. If you are a Windows user, choosing a YouTube video downloader is easy, but it is a different story. Download macOS Catalina for an all‑new entertainment experience. Your music, TV shows, movies, podcasts, and audiobooks will transfer automatically to the Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Podcasts, and Apple Books apps where you’ll still have access to your favorite iTunes features, including purchases, rentals, and imports.

If you are a Windows user, choosing a YouTube video downloader is easy, but it is a different story for Mac users. And therefore, we will present 15 best YouTube video downloader for Mac that are compatible with all Mac platforms, such as Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave, High Sierra, Sierra, EI Capitan & Yosemite etc., and there are more than 15 of them in the market.

Here is the list of 15 best YouTube video downloaderthat work on all Mac platforms in 2021.

• 1. Gihosoft TubeGet for Mac
• 2. MacX YouTube Downloader
• 3. Airy
• 4. ClipGrab
• 5. MediaHuman YouTube Downloader
• 6. 5KPlayer
• 7. Apowersoft
• 8. Wondershare AllMyTube
• 9. iTube Studio for Mac
• 10. Total Video Downloader
• 11. YTD
• 12. Downie
• 13. SConverter.com
• 14. Softorino YouTube Converter 2
• 15. 4K Video Downloader for Mac

1. Gihosoft TubeGet for Mac

If you are looking the best way to download YouTube videos on a MacBook, then you can resort to Gihosoft TubeGet, a YouTube video downloader for Mac & Windows. It allows users to download multiple videos or a whole playlist from YouTube at once even if the clips are lengthy. The tool has no trouble saving HD & UHD quality videos and it doesn’t hog much system resources.

Gihosoft TubeGet also offers the capability to download 48/60fps videos from YouTube, which is a boon for the game and sports lover. Well, to the language learner, Gihosoft TubeGet develops the feature to grab the closed caption, local subtitle, auto-generated subtitle & auto-translated subtitle are all supported.

2. MacX YouTube Downloader

If you are a Mac user, no matter MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac, Mac mini, no matter Mac OS X, OS X, macOS 10.12, 10.13, 10.14, 10.15, 10.16, and have a strong desire to download YouTube videos, MacX YouTube downloader for Mac is a nice choice. MacX helps to save videos from Facebook, Dailymotion, Vevo, Vimeo and multiple popular video hosting websites.

MacX YouTube downloader free full version supports to download YouTube videos in whatever resolution that YouTube provides, such as 720P, 1080P, 2K, 4K & 8K etc., and keep them in MP4 or WebM format. Integrated with an easy-to-use interface and advanced technology, MacX YouTube Downloader makes it the ultimate choice for you to download popular videos & musics at a fast speed with minimal quality loss.

3. Airy

Unlike other video downloader that listed in this article, Airy only works with YouTube, perhaps the developers know that concentration is the key to success. Airy offers the feature to download full HD 1080P, 4K & 8K Ultra HD videos from YouTube conveniently. You also get options on video formats, e.g. MP4, WebM, FLV, OGG & 3GP etc.. If you want to save soundtracks in MP3 format, and not keep the whole music video, Airy can perfectly finish this work, and it can even download the album art for you.

Airy also has the capability to save the entire playlist or channel from YouTube. Another big advantage about Airy is that it even lets you pause a download, and resume download the YouTube video right from where you suspended it, which is a perfect design if you are not on your computer all the time.

4. ClipGrab

Another Mac version YouTube video downloader added to this list is ClipGrab. ClipGrab is a completely free software which makes a living by donations, free as it’s, its video downloading feature doesn’t lose out to any competitor. ClipGrab allows you to search your videos directly through the address bar by keywords without opening YouTube, that’s quite time-saving.

When it comes to downloading YouTube videos, ClipGrab provides a super easy way to do that. Just copy and paste the link into the address box, it will show all the possible resolutions. You just click the “Grab this clip!” button, it will save the videos offline on the desktop of your MacBook or iMac.

5. MediaHuman YouTube Downloader

This Mac software can help you download videos from YouTube and many other similar video sharing websites like VKontakte, SoundCloud & Vevo etc.. What we love about this YouTube download app for Mac desktop is that it has so many practical features, such as simultaneous download, downloading HD & UHD videos such as 1080P, 2K, 4K & 8K, and the ability to download entire YouTube playlist & channel at a time.

Just like other YouTube downloader for Mac, MediaHuman also gives you options if you want to download the video or extract the audio track alone. This is a boon for people who enjoy music, it also can provide the original audio without quality loss. MediaHuman has many advanced features, you can find it in the preference setting, such as preventing from sleep while downloading, ignoring 30+ fps videos, using format priority list etc..

6. 5KPlayer

How can we download YouTube videos on MacBook in resolution up to 1080P, 2K, 4K or even 8K? Well, desktop packages can help you with that. Although these desktop software are not cross-platform, but they are more powerful in functions than online downloader on Safari. Downloading HD & UDH videos for those tools is just easy as pie. The best part of these software is that they can batch download all the videos on a playlist at one time, and grab the subtitles as well.

For YouTube download software on Mac, 5KPlayer is one of the best. This app works flawlessly on Mac system to download videos and movies in MP4, WebM, MKV, 3GP depending on your preferences. It also supports video resolutions from 360P, 720P, 1080P to 4K & 8K, which means it will allow you to download really high-resolution videos. This is perfect for those who want to download clear long videos, such as full feature films and documentaries.

7. Apowersoft

Perhaps what is great about this app is that it lets you convert videos to other file formats suitable for devices like iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, PSP, Kindle Fire, and other mobile devices. This Mac video downloader understands that some of us do not just watch videos on our computers, but also on other portable devices. But not just that, it also helps you download high-resolution videos outside of YouTube. You can also use this app to download videos from Twitter, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Facebook.

As a bonus feature, this easy-to-use app will even allow you to download YouTube playlist to your Mac. Not satisfied with the only downloading function, Apowersoft also integrates itself with screen record and video conversion section, now it becomes an one-stop tool. With Apowersoft in hand, one can easily download online videos from YouTube, record game videos, and convert videos taken by camera to more popular formats so that users can easily edit and upload them to YouTube.

8. Wondershare AllMyTube

Wondershare AllMyTube is a pretty popular app, probably one of the most used YouTube video downloader for Mac. Supporting many popular sites, AllMyTube can also convert videos to other formats or to music files, grab whole playlists and handle batch downloads all at once. It’s a shareware so you get limited functions, the free version can only allow users to download 2 videos, and there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee.

The design of AllMyTube is very intuitive, it has 4 parts: downloading, downloaded, converted & WiFi transfer. When you finish downloading your YouTube videos, you can convert them to other formats and send them to your phones directly by scanning the QR code. As a senior specialist for YouTube, AllMyTube supports download age-restricted YouTube videos, just input the login password, you can unblock the restriction.

9.iTube Studio for Mac

To save videos from YouTube on your Mac devices (MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac or Mac mini), we have another alternative for you – iTube Studio for Mac.

The best thing about this app is that it’s integrated with many useful functions, such as video downloading, recording, converting & transferring, totally an all-in-one tool. Equipped with a private mode, now you can use it to download videos in secret. As a professional video recorder, iTube allows you to record videos from Netflix, Hulu, iTunes & BBC iPlayer etc.. So if a video site is prohibited from downloading, you can just record them, nice design.

10. Total Video Downloader

There are multiple applications which you can utilize to save YouTube videos on your MacBook Air or Pro successfully, and Total Video Downloader is one of the best and fastest. This app is designed to download any video uploaded on the Internet, and it works exactly well for what it’s designed for.

This app offers an interface that looks like a web browser, so users can have easy access to many hot videos on YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo and Lynda. However, if this app is in running for one of the top apps to use when downloading videos, it will fall behind when it comes to format conversion. But that’s not a big deal, you can use other apps to convert videos instead. However, when it comes to downloading videos, this app is highly recommended.

11. YTD

Although we have talked about many desktop software that work smoothly on MacBook, I’d like to add another one to this list – YTD. YTD is also a popular app which we hear a lot. Users can easily navigate through this app and get on with their download without the challenge of getting familiar with the interface.

YTD lets you download videos just like other YouTube downloaders, but with an added bonus feature of allowing you to convert videos to different formats & cut the videos to your preferred length. What we love about this downloader is that it’s one of the most handy apps. It is very simple, and thus very easy to use.

12. Downie

Downie is video downloader for YouTube & many other video sites that works only on Mac operating system, and it requires macOS 10.11+, including Big Sur, Mojave, High Sierra, Sierra, EI Capitan. Like many other competitors, Downie supports many video hosting sites, including YouTube, Youku, Bilibili, Vimeo & SoundCloud etc., and the number is rapidly growing. It can grab HD videos up to 4K, and convert videos into MP4 or MP3 so you can play them on your iTunes.

Downie is multilingual, and it updates about once a week with new features, bug fixes, and new sites supported. What it attracts me is that the software can group the video file by site and playlist, so that all the downloads can be sorted into folders based on where you downloaded them from or from which playlist they are.

13. SConverter.com

When the topic of downloading YouTube videos on a MacBook comes up, usually there are 2 ways to do this. One is to install a full version program, just like the software I have mentioned above, or you can use an online video downloader, and SConverter.com is a good recommendation.

To make downloading YouTube videos as simple as possible, SConverter.com requires you to do nothing more than paste a link and hit ‘Download’ button. The downside of these sites is that they can only download videos from YouTube with the resolution up to 720P, while can’t do anything for the 1080P & higher resolution videos, such as 2K, 4K & 8K, let alone 60fps videos. But if you just want to download a single clip & save time, then an online YouTube downloader is ideal.

14. Softorino YouTube Converter 2

YouTube itself has no passage in downloading videos directly, on both desktop and mobile. However, sometimes you have your reasons to do this, especially when you are on trains, subways, buses, or trips to places without reliable 4G or WiFi. That being said, with a right YouTube video downloader in hand, grabbing videos from YouTube is a surprisingly easy thing, and it doesn’t require a high configuration laptop.

Softorino YouTube Converter 2 is a fast video download for Mac which can fully satisfy your needs without any complications. This tool allows you to download video from YouTube, SoundCloud, Vimeo, BandCamp, VK, LiveLeak, and many more. Apart from that, you can also download the content as video, audio, or even create them as ringtone. Integrated with an automatic Wi-Fi feature, now you can transfer downloaded media to other devices such as iPhone, iPod or iTunes at a fast speed without USB cable.

15. 4K Video Downloader for Mac

For those who want to download & keep videos from YouTube on their Apple computer, 4K Video Downloader for Mac has always been a good and reliable option. This desktop app for Mac covers many popular sites, such as YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, Dailymotion and Metacafe, and it doesn’t have any snag in saving videos offline.

The developers of this tool pay great attention to simplicity and usability, you can download your favorite videos in the precise format or resolution you need, and has no hassle in downloading multiple videos in batch simultaneously. All in all, 4K Video Downloader for Mac is a good video downloading solution and it does what is promises without any complications.

In Conclusion

When you finish reading this article, you will have clear thought about how to download YouTube videos on a Mac computer. And now I’d like to hear from you: What’s your #1 YouTube video downloader for MacBook? If you have personally been using any app that is powerful, don’t be shy and type in your recommendations in the comments section below.

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Status: Dec 2020 - Confirmed that Big Sur uses the same Media file locations

Apple decided to abandon iTunes with its Catalina macOS release. In Catalina the iTunes media swiss army knife has been replaced with three seperate applications and some functions that are now 'hidden' in sharing.

The impact is that upgrading to Catalina changes quite a lot of macOS media handling. This is likely to be problematic, for many Mac users, as media content is one of the most valuable things on a well used Mac.

This note provides guideance as to where the various media files are stored and what you can do to make things managable.

With iTunes all your media was contained within:

• ~/Music/iTunes (by default)

Sitting under this you had:

• 'iTunes Music' or 'iTunes Media' - folder (depending on how old your library is) where your various media files were kept
• 'iTunes Music Library.xml' - the old library index file
• 'iTunes Library.itl' - the new library index file

Itunes Download For Windows

If you have set iTunes to manage your library then all your media files will be sitting under this directory structure, including: Music, Movies, TV & Podcasts

This was nice as you could move the library by just copying/moving the entire directory structure and all was well.

This is no longer the case with Catalina.

With macOS Catalina what was once handled by one big iTunes application is now handled by three big applications and Books ;-) .

• Music - for your music content and music videos
• TV - for your Movies and TV content
• Podcasts - for your podcasts
• Books - for your books which was moved out of iTunes some time ago

Each of these has its own media storage location, but depending on how you started, the actual media content could still be held within your prior iTunes Library (above).

The default locations for media in this new world are:

• ~/Music/Music - for you music files
• ~/Movies/TV - for your movie and tv files
• ~/Library/Group Containers/243LU875E5.groups.com.apple.podcasts/Library/Cache - podcasts are now held in special container and not directly manageable
• ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books - iBooks were moved into a special container sometime ago, again to some surprise and have a habit of disappearing ...

The details for the various apps and storage locations are described in turn.

NOTE: These media file locations are also valid with 'Big Sur'

Music

• ~/Music/Music

Sitting within this you will have:

• Media - folder where media content files are kept
• 'Music Library.musiclibrary' - the new music library catalog file (replacement for 'iTunes Library.itl', but this is really a directory which contains a further set of files including Preferences.plist file)

NOTE: the plist file is a binary files, but you can see contents using the plutil command.

If you had an existing iTunes library then on starting the new Music app, you will be prompted to migrate your library Music. This will load the catalog and set the media location to the existing iTunes media location.

If you want re-consolidate your music and music videos under the new Music library then:

1. Ensure you have a Media directory in ~/Music/Music (i.e. ~/Music/Music/Media)
2. Change Media location via: Music - Preferences - Files to: /Users/<YOU>/Music/Music/Media . Then select - 'Keep Music folder organised' and 'Copy files to Music Media folder when adding to library'. You will get prompted to copy files as per preferences, so select 'Yes'.
3. Now in Music - select: 'File - Library - Organise Library...' and when prompted select 'Yes'. It is only now that it will copy all the content from you existing iTunes media folder to the new location.

NOTE: There is a signficant bug in new Music App when it comes to keeping your iTunes cover art. There are many reports of intital migration resulting in lost cover art, and if you have very large iTunes libray then the cover art migration process can take more than a day to complete. I have found that even it you do manage to get the inital migration to Music to process the cover art successfully, if you move your library to different a machine then the cover art will get lost again and fixing is either a programming exercise or a laborious manual process.

See 'Music Cover Art' below for more information.

Music Cover Art

Music cover art is one of the problem areas in moving from iTuness to Music. In iTunes cover art is managed via a special catalog within the iTunes media library. There are a number of different levels of cover art that iTunes and Music manage:

• Indivdiual Media File - such as .mp4 or apple .m4a / .m4p variations. These can have cover art embedded into then using 'meta tags'
• Album - this is a collection of Individual Media Files within a directory/folder. Unlike an individual media files the director/folder does have directly embedded graphics, so instead the cover art graphic that is displayed must be managed as part of the overall library catalog. In the case of iTunes this cover art catalog/cache was held within the iTunes media directory. In Music the catalog is stored in seperate & fixed location.
• Artist - these are the small icon graphics that are displayed in middle panel if you view your library by Artist. Many moons ago these used to be based on Album cover art. Now they are created automatically by iTunes or Music app and there does not appeary to be a way to manually populate this data.

In Music the cover art directory appears to be maintained seperately in:

• ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.APMArtworkAgent/Data/Documents

This container based catalog is obviously not in the same directory tree as ~/Music/Music .

The consequence of this is that if you move your Music directory to another machine, then you will be leaving behind the cover art catalog.

Apple answer to this problem is that any moving of media data from one Mac to another should be done via the Migration Assistant, which is aware of all the various files and locations.

NOTE: Big Sur appears to have address some of the cover art bugs. See my Big Sur update.

TV

• ~/Movies/TV

Sitting within this you will have:

• Media - folder where media content files are kept
• 'TV Library.tvlibrary' - the TV/movie library catalog (again like Music this is a directory which contains the various library catalog files)

The migration from iTunes to Catalina TV is equivalent to that for Music. The migration to TV library occurs when you first run TV app. This generates a new catalog and media files will be left in iTunes folder.

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If you want to consolidate into new ~/Movies/TV directory then you will need to follow simillar step to Music above:

1. Ensure you have Media directory in ~/Movies/TV (ie ~/Movies/TV/Media)
2. Change Media location via: TV - Preferences - Files to: /Users/<YOU>/Movies/TV/Media . Select - 'Keep Media folder organised' and 'Copy files to Media folder when adding to library'. You will get prompted to copy files as per preferences, select 'Yes'.
3. Now in TV - select: 'File - Library - Organise Library...' and when prompted select 'Yes'. It is only now that it will copy all the content from you existing iTunes media folder.

NOTE: The Movie / TV content migration seems to work and be less problematic than music one. One reason is that there is no Cover Art. A problem I have seen is that if you have downloaded movies from the iTunes Store, then these now appear twice in your Movie library, one for the downloaded copy and a second one for the iTunes store cloud version. If you delete the downloaded version from your library and then re-download the file, this fixes the problem. If you have a large number of Movies then this will result in a lot of very large downloads.

Podcasts

Be aware that the Podcasts app, will want to automatically delete played podcasts and if you have old podcast that are no longer available then this will result in lost podcasts. So ensure you change your Preferences to stop auto deletion of played podcasts.

I have sucessfully moved Podcasts from one machine to another by copying the entire directory tree and contents:

Why bother and some good things & bad things

All this moving media content around is a nuisance, so why bother. The reason is that media files take up lot of storage space and many people move them to external storage for both more storage, but also to provide greater data security. Having a large media store on a single disk has high risk of failure, in fact it is guaranteed to fail eventually.

With iTunes this was pretty easy to do as you could simply move/copy the entire iTunes directory to an alternate location and then restart iTunes holding the 'Option' key and select the new location.

When you have the catalog and media content in different directories and music and music and movies managed seperately this is not possible. So the easiest way is to accept the Catalina change and move to two seperate consolidated directories.

Having seperate library for Music and Movies means you have some additional flexibility in the files location.

I have also found that when consolidating under the new directories that the new APFS file system must be using some type of hard linking as my 700GB existing media library, did not grow to double the size on consolidation.

Once I had consolidated my content into each of the seperate directories, Movie and Podcasts appear to be readily movable, but music is problematic due Cover art bugs. On consolidating to new location I was able to remove the old iTunes directory, to help recover disk space.

This blog posting was driven by desperation, as recently our family media Mac mini running Catalina crashed and I had to go to some substantial lengths to get back all the media content on it.

The recovery process meant peeling off the details of changes that have occured to iTunes and its storage solution. The documentation for Catalina was very limited and less detailed than what was previously available on iTunes.

To validate and test this I have used a combination of repaired Mac, a KVM virtual machine based on Time Machine backup of dead Mac and a MacBook Pro laptop, so process of recovery of Catalina based media required quite a lot time, 3 Macs and lots of storage to test various alternate recovery techniques.

References & Links:

Reading and Modifying OS X plists - very old blog on plists tools

Move or Manage the Music, Apple TV and Podcasts Libraries - Rocket Yard (MacSales) partial information on how to manage Catalina media libraries

What happened to iTunes ? - Apple's answers to the surprise they gave us ...

Big Sur - does this change things, fix things or it is the same. I have done some initial testing and documented finding in my 'Big Sur' update

Big Sur Os

Low Res Image (based on Arcade Fire - Funeral) - via SoundCloud - Out of Tune