DownAccess and Accessible Media Converter: the Downie and Permute of Windows

Hi both, and thank you for taking the time to write.

Nut — you found a real bug, and I'm glad you did. The year is actually being saved, it's just written in a newer style of tag that Windows itself doesn't know how to display, so it looks like it's gone when you check the file's properties. The other details survive because they're named the same way in both styles; the year is the one that changes. I'll switch to the older, more widely understood style in the next update, and it will show up where you expect it. Thanks for reporting it — this is one I could have missed for a long time on my own.

techluver — yes, DownAccess uses yt-dlp, and I'd rather say so plainly than dress it up.

That said, it's a hybrid rather than a plain wrapper around it. yt-dlp does the extracting and the downloading, and DownAccess adds its own layer on top, driving a real browser for the things yt-dlp can't manage on its own. Long playlists and channels are the clearest example: YouTube only hands over the first hundred or two entries, so for anything longer the app quietly opens a real page in the background, scrolls it all the way down and collects the full list before handing it back. Sites that need an account work the same way — you sign in yourself in a real browser window, and the app carries on from there.

You're right that yt-dlp breaks on YouTube from time to time. What I can control is how fast the repair reaches you, and that's the part I built around. DownAccess follows yt-dlp's nightly builds rather than its stable releases, and it quietly updates itself every time you launch it — it doesn't wait for me to publish a new version of the app. So when YouTube changes something and a fix appears, usually within hours, it reaches you the next time you open the program. Nothing to install, no command line, no waiting on me.

There's one more thing that catches a lot of similar apps out: for a while now YouTube has needed a small JavaScript engine alongside the downloader, and without one you simply get "no formats available". DownAccess comes with it built in, so it works out of the box.

It's still a real trade-off, and I won't pretend otherwise. Going through yt-dlp buys thousands of supported sites and very quick repairs, at the price of depending on someone else's schedule. An engine written by hand, the way Downie does it, is steadier site by site but covers far fewer of them. For a free Windows app maintained by one person I think I chose the right side — and the parts I could take into my own hands, I have.

Either way, I'm glad it can be something to hand to people when they ask.

Mathieu

Nut — a correction to what I told you earlier, and an apology for the wrong explanation.

I said the year was being written in a newer style of tag that Windows can't display. I checked properly this time, by asking Windows itself what it reads rather than assuming, and that wasn't it at all: Windows reads both styles perfectly well.

What actually happens is that Windows only understands a date written as a plain year, or as year-month-day. Files that come from iTunes or Apple Music carry a full timestamp instead — year, month, day and the time of day — and the converter was passing that straight through. Windows gives up on it and leaves the year blank, while the title, artist and album come through fine. Which is exactly what you saw.

Testing it properly turned up two more cases I would otherwise have shipped without noticing. FLAC files are stricter still: they only show a year if it's written on its own, with no month or day beside it. And Windows never reads the year out of a WMA file at all unless it's stored in one particular field that we weren't filling in.

So the fix is wider than what I first announced. The date is now tidied into the form Windows understands, adapted to each format — MP3, FLAC and WMA all show the year now. I checked each one against what File Explorer actually displays, instead of trusting the conversion tool's own read-back, which was cheerfully reporting a year that Windows was never going to show.

Thanks again for the report. It turned out to be three bugs, not one.

Mathieu