Why does it output 320 kbps MP3?

[Goosegit11]

Question

Why does it output 320 kbps MP3 when YouTube doesn't have such thing?
yt-dlp, for example, produces 120-130 kbps mp3s with this command:
yt-dlp -f ba -x --audio-format mp3 $1

Checklist

• I've looked through the README and the WiKi for something similar.
• I tried talking with the developer on the Telegram support group.

I couldn't find any Telegram contacts in this repo or on your website.

[deepjyoti30]

ytmdl converts the final audio file fetched from youtube into a 320kbps file through ffmpeg. This question has been raised previously and I think there is really no particular reason that it is 320kbps as compared to the default (120kbps).

I think with the init code of the app, the idea was to provide 320kbps as that was considered the most commonly used bitrate.

However, if your concern is audio quality being messed up, I think you can download in the other formats supported by ytmdl such as opus and m4a.

[Goosegit11]

There is literally no reason to output at 320kbps, it doesn't give better quality or compatibility, it just increases the file size, and in general converting a low bitrate to a higher bitrate is a bad form.

[insertish]

Just caught this. If there's no particular reason to use 320 kbps then it should just use the exact bitrate of the file it's re-encoding from by default. It just seems silly to waste space like this.

I don't really see the argument of using 320kbps because it's the most common, you're not getting any more data out of the original file, it's just been padded out and it certainly won't cause any compatibility issues?