Audio-only youtube player

There is youtube-dl that lets you download youtube videos from the cli. There is also a new(ish) tool called mps-youtube, that I haven't personally used, but looks like it does exactly what you want.

https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube

Give it a try and let us know if it works

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MPS is available in Ubuntu repos.

Launch the MPS console with

mpsyt

To search youtube in mps console:

/<your_search_term>

After searching a term, and then selecting a number, the stream will play sound; there are play/pause, seek, volume options:

To see options:

mpsyt h

More detailed options:

mpsyt help search

mpsyt help download

After searching and then selecting the number of the stream with a command that would show download options:

d <number>

Playlists can also be searched in the PLS console with

pls <search_term>

or even simpler

//<serch_term>

VLC can do that.

• Use cvlc to turn off the GUI
• Reject the video to just play the audio using --vout none or --no-video

Example:

cvlc --vout none <URL>
cvlc --no-video <URL>

You can do this with yturl, for example, using mpv or mplayer:

mpv --no-video "$(yturl <url>)"
mplayer -novideo "$(yturl <url>)"

Disclaimer: I am the author of yturl.