Downie 4.13.1 — Mac version

Downie runs on any Mac with macOS 11 (Big Sur) or newer, both Apple Silicon and Intel 64-bit machines. No fussy hardware requirements — if your machine handles the operating system, it handles this.

Grabbing a video: step by step

• Find a video in your browser and copy the URL.
• Switch to Downie and paste it — the download starts straight away.
• Watch the progress bar. Done. The file lands on your desktop as an MP4, automatically converted if needed.

What makes it stick

You can also drag a link straight into the app window, or use the built-in search if you haven't got a URL to hand. For bulk jobs, feed it a CSV or XML list and it works through the queue while you get on with something else. The interface comes in 32 languages, so you can switch it to whatever you're comfortable with.

Fewer “can’t find the stream” errors on Instagram and Twitter

Version 4.13.1 tightened up extraction on a handful of sites that had shifted their delivery methods. In daily use that means fewer "can't find the stream" errors on platforms like Instagram and Twitter — the ones where links tend to break between app revisions. YouTube handling stayed solid. The real difference is that you spend less time re-pasting a link and more time actually getting the file.

Earlier in the 4.x cycle, the move to native Apple Silicon support was the big leap. If you're on an M1 or M2 machine, the app now starts cold in under two seconds and sits quietly in the menu bar without nudging the fans. Intel Macs run it just fine, but the efficiency bump on Apple Silicon is noticeable when you're pulling 4K footage in the background.

Another quiet improvement was the Permute hand-off. When you tell Downie to send a download to Permute for conversion, the handshake is now near-instant — no more waiting for the helper to wake up first. Small thing, but it takes friction out of a task you might do a dozen times in an afternoon.

Stop dumping everything on your desktop

Out of the box, Downie drops every download onto your desktop. That gets messy fast. Head to Preferences > Save and pick a dedicated folder — something like ~/Downloads/Video keeps things tidy. While you're there, tick Create subfolder for each download if you regularly grab playlists or multi-part rips.

Next, visit the Post-processing tab. The default is to convert everything to MP4, which works for most people. But if you only want the audio, switch it to Extract audio only and choose M4A or MP3 as the output. Now every paste gives you a music file with no extra steps.

One more worth a look: under Browser Extensions, enable the extension for whichever browser you use. Once it's installed, a single click in the toolbar sends the current page to Downie — you skip the copy-paste dance entirely. The extension also lets you queue videos from a page without switching windows, which adds up when you're working through a watch-later list.

A real task: saving a YouTube playlist as audio files

Say you've got a playlist of hour-long talks and you want them on your phone for a commute. Here's the workflow, start to finish.

1. Open the playlist page in your browser and copy the URL — not a single video, the whole playlist.
2. In Downie, go to File > Open URL and paste it. The app spots the playlist and offers to add every video to the queue.
3. Before you hit Start, check Preferences > Post-processing is set to Extract audio only with MP3 selected. That way you're not downloading 4K video you'll never watch.
4. Click Start and let it work through the list. A playlist of ten talks might take five or ten minutes, depending on your connection.
5. When the queue finishes, open the save folder. You'll find each talk as a named, tagged MP3, ready to drag onto your device.

The whole thing is three clicks and a paste. You don't touch a converter, you don't rename files one by one, and you don't sit through ads. If one file fails — rare, but it happens — Downie marks it in red and you can retry just that one without re-queuing the whole batch.

If you grab a lot of audio-only content, consider setting up a second save location specifically for extracted audio. That way your video downloads and music files never mingle, and you can point your media player straight at the folder.

• macOS 11 or later
• Apple Silicon or Intel 64-bit Mac