Downie for Mac

You find a lecture on Vimeo, a short documentary on YouTube and a clip on Instagram you want to keep before the poster archives it. You paste the three links into Downie, tell it to grab the audio-only from the lecture and wait a minute. That is the rhythm the app has settled into: quiet, single-purpose, unobtrusive.

Batch import from 1,200+ sites: reference clips, talks and audio-only rips

• Collecting reference material, talks and archival footage from more than 1,200 supported sites
• Extracting just the audio track when the visual is secondary
• Batch work: import a CSV or XML file, assign custom titles and let it process the queue
• Post-processing with Permute, if you need a different format afterwards
• Starting a download by pasting a URL, dragging a link, or searching inside the app

Mac-only utility: function-first design with no built-in format conversion

• Requires macOS 11 or later; runs natively on Apple Silicon and Intel
• The interface is utilitarian rather than polished — it values function over ornament
• No built-in format conversion; that is where Permute comes in

In short: a focused tool for anyone who regularly pulls videos from the web and prefers a Mac-native way to do it without a browser extension.

A lecturer’s afternoon: saving a semester’s worth of clips

A film-studies lecturer I know keeps a private library of scenes for classroom analysis. On a Tuesday in late November she opens Downie to gather eight clips — four from YouTube, three from Vimeo and one from a French public-television archive. She pastes the URLs in rapid succession, typing a custom title for each as she goes: Godard-tracking-shot, Akerman-kitchen, Varda-gleaners-opening. The app queues them without fanfare. She checks the audio-only box for two of the Vimeo links — those are interviews where the picture is merely a talking head — and walks away to make tea. By the time the kettle boils, six files sit in her designated folder, neatly named. The remaining two finish while she arranges the clips into a lecture outline.

A complete workflow: from URL to organised library

Consider the task of building a small reference collection from several sources, each requiring a different treatment. The workflow below assumes Downie handles the fetching and Permute covers any subsequent format work.

1. Gather the URLs. Drag them from the browser address bar directly into Downie’s main window, or paste them from a text file where you have been collecting links throughout the week.
2. Assign titles immediately. Click the filename field next to each queued item and type a human-readable name. This avoids the mess of cryptic defaults like jC3zZ5h7LpQ.mp4.
3. Set per-item preferences. For the lecture you want as audio only, open the dropdown beside that entry and choose the audio-extraction option. For the concert footage, confirm it is fetching the 4K variant if the source offers one.
4. Choose a destination. Downie remembers the last folder used, but switching mid-session is a single click: perhaps Research/Japanese-cinema/raw for one batch and Teaching/spring-term/week-3 for another.
5. Start the queue. Watch the progress bars advance; the app processes four at a time by default, which keeps bandwidth reasonable on a domestic connection.
6. Post-process selectively. Drag the completed files that need conversion — say, from MKV to MP4 — onto Permute’s icon. For the two halves of a split documentary, use Permute’s join feature to stitch them into a single file before filing.
7. File into Finder. Move the finished pieces into their permanent folders. Tag them with Finder tags if your system relies on those; Spotlight will index the filenames and tags equally well.

From bouncing dock icon to finished download: a session in silence

The dock icon bounces once and settles. Downie opens to an empty window — no splash screen, no welcome panel — just a pale grey rectangle with a plus button in the toolbar. You click the plus, paste a YouTube link for a twenty-minute architectural walkthrough, and press Return. The entry appears in the list with a thumbnail, a detected filename and a small dropdown for format choices. You leave it on “Best available” and paste a second link, this time an Instagram reel. The reel resolves faster because it is short. A third link, a Dailymotion clip, goes in. The queue sits there, three rows, waiting.

You press the “Start all” button. Progress indicators begin to fill: percentages climb, estimated times appear and then refine. The Dailymotion clip finishes first. Finder opens automatically to the download folder, a setting you can toggle on or off in preferences. You glance at the file, confirm it plays with a quick tap of the spacebar, and close Finder. The other two complete within a minute of each other. You select them both, right-click, and choose “Open in Permute” from the services menu Downie installs. Permute launches and presents its own small queue, ready to convert to MP4 or HEVC if you need smaller files for an iPad. You click Convert, wait a few seconds, and the session is done.

With other apps and the system

Downie does not try to be an ecosystem; it works well because it stays small and lets other tools handle everything else. The browser extension for Safari, Firefox and Chrome catches links before you even copy them — a single click on the toolbar icon sends the current page’s video straight to the queue. That means a research session can stay entirely in the browser, with Downie collecting files in the background as you read.

Integration with Permute is the most visible pairing, but the app also fits into Finder workflows. Downloaded files land in a folder you can point directly at a Hazel rule, if you use Hazel: auto-sort by source, add Spotlight comments, or move files tagged “audio-only” into a separate archive. The CSV import feature lets another app — a script, a shortcut, a manually maintained spreadsheet — generate a batch list. You might keep a plain-text file of video links in a project folder, and once a week open Downie, import it, and let the app refresh your offline copies while you answer email.

macOS services tie it together: the right-click “Open in Downie” command appears anywhere the system recognises a URL, including Mail messages, Notes and PDFs. Drag a URL from a PDF annotation in Preview onto the dock icon, and the download begins. Quick Look works on completed files without leaving the app. And because the downloads are just files in a folder, they behave exactly as you expect: Time Machine backs them up, Spotlight finds them, and you can drag them into Keynote, Final Cut Pro or any other tool without an intermediate step.

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