Alright so this is my rough and weird guide for how to download and create a CD. This might not be the best workflow and you could do this in a bunch of different ways but its kinda lame. Plus, I think its kinda worthwhile to just get a bit more familiar with your computer and abandon all those sketchy "Youtube to mp3" sites.
All of the [] things should be replaced by you unless you just really like having brackets or something. Everything that looks like this should be entered into your terminal. Nothing fancy needed just use whatever is installed.
Go buy a cd drive like this pretty much anything you find online should work. I'm not giving recomendations since I use a built in optical drive for this so I just don't know. Also go buy cd-r's don't buy cd-rw's since most cars don't support them.
This is probably the scariest part. We'll be installing a program that allows for easier downloading of software and all the dependencies they require. Should point out this isn't exactly the safest like installing anything is. This is basically just the App Store (So it's not uniquely insecure).
Wanna download those spotify playlists! No you don't because that's illegal. Have a spotify playlist of only just the songs that you own and can legally download yourself? Well thats kinda weird but maybe you lost the files somewhere. Go check out my little shell script thingy over here
First off enter into your terminal xcode-select --install this will install some type of Apples developer tools so we can use them. Agree to all the stuff and it might take a bit.
Next copy and paste /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)" into the terminal application. This is just following the instructions on the main site NOTE THERE'S A PKG INSTALLER THERE TOO THAT MIGHT BE EASIER.
Now that we have homebrew just type brew install yt-dlp and wait a bit then bam you got a youtube downloader installed.
This allows you to download stuff from a bunch of sites so much easier than other ways. We use various filters and other things to fine tune the downloads. If we wanted to download the video? Gotcha. Maybe just want a low quality video? Gotcha there too. Just want audio? (Us!) Boom. But first we need another program.
So now just type brew install ffmpeg and bam we got FFMPEG. This is a whole complex thing thats really really cool! You can do a bunch of crazy things with it but most importantly you can convert audio or whatever in the easiest way possible! No more upload limits or random websites!
This is an OPTIONAL one but I like it for allowing you to make the files a lot cleaner. All this does is edit the metadata of our files so then we can have it be read and organized by whatever music player we're using. Pretty sick! Type brew install --cask musicbrainz-picard no longer a command line thing (Yay?) so we got a GUI.
Apple might not like you installing apps with homebrew so you might have to do a couple of things to make sure they let you. You might have to go into your applications folder in finder and manually right click then launch the app from there. Might not though and maybe can just use the launchpad. Or just retreat and use brew uninstall --cask musicbrainz-picard then head over to their website and install from there
I also plan to update this so there's a pure command line only interface because I hate gui's.
Alright so first off I get if the terminal is kinda scary but its actually pretty nice to use! Besides all the bad stuff. One of the big things about terminal is just understanding how it works. We don't have gui so instead we get to see that little thing on the right of the %. How do we move around though? We use this command called cd [destination] which will allow us to move around. If its helpful we can use the command called ls which will list all of the available space to move. Then we can type cd [destination] and we will move into that folder. You've just learned how to use a non-gui thing!
What we're gonna have to do is move around in this terminal to make sure we're in the right place. So the first thing is to just make on your desktop a folder for all this stuff. (Could be placed anywhere but desktop is nice) Now type cd desktop and this will take us the the desktop. Next we do cd [whatever the folder is named] and then yay we're set up.
Now back in the terminal type yt-dlp -x -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" "[URL]” (Replace the [URL] with desired link which can be a playlist link if desired. Keep the quotation marks.)
We first call the program, yt-dlp, and then add some configs to it. For us we are doing -x which tells the program to give us an audio file at the end. Then we us -f which tells it to filter and that filter is the 'ba' thing which means best audio. Lastly we use -o which determines the file name output and we'll make it the song title and the file extension.
So now we have the files as this weird .opus file which is basically just a .mp3 file but better. Heres a chance for variation. If you want to you could convert the files to different types.
Make sure you're still in the folder!
So now type ffmpeg -i "file name".opus "file name".wav this will convert the file to whatever. In this case we're using .wav files because it doesn't compress things which means theres just less issues with it. Also would be higher quality.
Heres a sometimes useful version though which is for i in *.opus; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}.wav"; done this lets you bulk convert files. You can change the filetype as needed :)
Now put the .wav files into one specific folder. Then open up MusicBrainz. Do the add folder thing and move into that folder. Next select all the files and do the cluster thing. Then press lookup and it should load everything up. If the album cover is needed go download that from the web (might need to go to Discogs for the right one). Drag and drop that into the little cd looking thing in the bottom right. Boom hit save and you're done with the files.
So theres a bunch of options to burn a cd but we'll just use the default apple music function. So first open up apple music and then go to the file thing in the top left. Hover over library then import playlist and go to your folder and select all the songs in the playlist. Now plug in your CD drive and open up the album in Music and them press cmd-s and go through the stuff. If you'd like you can press cmd-p then CD jewel case insert and this will let you print a cool track list.