YouTube is absolutely unacceptable quality. The difference is clearly audible even on $5 earbuds. I feel sorry for your ears if you don’t hear the difference, but the vast majority of those who care enough to download music will be able to tell the difference.

I personally pay for Deezer HiFi and save the FLACs locally. Friends mostly do the same with Tidal, but both work well for this purpose.

If you want to find FLACs without paying for a service you can check out rutracker. It has torrents for discographies from a lot of famous artists. Alternatively, you could find a stolen account for one of the previously mentioned services, but that goes too far for my morals because you’re hurting a normal person with a hacked account.

Despite all the naysayers in the comments, this is the correct answer. No ad-riddled websites, no weird guis. just “yt-dlp < url of whatever you want to rip >” in bash.

Lots of people responding to this need to acquaint themselves with the raw power of yt-dlp. It isn’t just for YouTube. You can rip Deezer and other streaming audio services. You can rip pretty much any video site. It even takes RSS and M3U8 links and will rip live streams.

On Android I use Newpipe for downloading audio-only.

If you like cli try streamrip on github. Then you can download from deezer, qobuz, or tidal. Like you said, there lots of free arl for those online.

A much simpler solution is using doubledouble for those not as tech savvy.

Deezer sent out a mail that they are closing the free service so it may not work anymore (without a paid Deezer account)