# How to fix the ffmpeg not found error with youtube-dl

> Fix the 'ffmpeg not found' error from youtube-dl when extracting audio to mp3, by installing ffmpeg on your Mac with a single brew install ffmpeg command.

Author: [Flavio Copes](https://flaviocopes.com/about/) | Published: 2022-05-21 | Topics: [Tools](https://flaviocopes.com/tags/tools/) | Canonical: https://flaviocopes.com/fix-ffmpeg-not-found-youtube-dl/

I love fan noises while sleeping. My sleep quality totally changed for the better since I started.

I was downloading a fan noise audio track from YouTube to put in the Music app using `youtube-dl`, like this:

```sh
youtube-dl ciD52cwJGCs --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --prefer-ffmpeg; 
```

But after downloading the file, I got the error

`ERROR: ffprobe/avprobe and ffmpeg/avconv not found. Please install one.`

To solve this on my Mac I had to run

```
brew install ffmpeg
```

It took a while, then I ran the command again and since the file was already downloaded, it was a quick process to get the mp3.