YouTube Audio & Transcript MCP Server

An MCP server that lets AI agents (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, and other MCP clients) convert YouTube videos to audio files and fetch YouTube transcripts.

It calls two RapidAPI APIs with your own RapidAPI key:

• YouTube Audio Downloader & Converter: MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC, AAC, OPUS, OGG and WebM, with clipping.

• YouTube Transcript, Subtitle & Metadata API (youtube-transcript-subtitle-metadata-api.p.rapidapi.com): existing manual or automatic captions as text, JSON segments, LLM chunks, Markdown, SRT or VTT.

Tools

Errors from the API are passed through with their code, for example Error TRANSCRIPT_NOT_AVAILABLE (HTTP 422): ... or Error RAPIDAPI_NOT_SUBSCRIBED (HTTP 403): ....

Related MCP server: YouTube for AI Agents

Get a RapidAPI key

1. Open the YouTube Audio API on RapidAPI and subscribe to a plan.

2. To use youtube_transcript, also subscribe to the YouTube Transcript, Subtitle & Metadata API with the same account.

3. Copy your X-RapidAPI-Key from the endpoint playground. That value is your RAPIDAPI_KEY.

Install

The server runs with npx, so you do not need to install anything else. It needs Node.js 18 or later.

RAPIDAPI_KEY=your-key npx -y github:pauliusdotpro/youtube-media-mcp

Claude Desktop

Add this to claude_desktop_config.json (Settings, Developer, Edit Config):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "youtube-media": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "github:pauliusdotpro/youtube-media-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "RAPIDAPI_KEY": "your-rapidapi-key"
      }
    }
  }
}

Claude Code

claude mcp add youtube-media --env RAPIDAPI_KEY=your-rapidapi-key -- npx -y github:pauliusdotpro/youtube-media-mcp

Cursor

Add this to ~/.cursor/mcp.json, or to .cursor/mcp.json in your project:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "youtube-media": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "github:pauliusdotpro/youtube-media-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "RAPIDAPI_KEY": "your-rapidapi-key"
      }
    }
  }
}

Environment variables

Example prompts

• "Convert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw to a 320 kbps MP3 and give me the link."

• "Get the audio from 1:00 to 2:30 of this video as FLAC."

• "Summarize this video from its English transcript."

• "Download Spanish subtitles for this video as SRT."

Notes

• Download links are short-lived (results expire after about 30 minutes). Download the file soon after you get the link.

• Transcripts come from caption tracks that YouTube already has. If a video has no captions, the tool returns TRANSCRIPT_NOT_AVAILABLE. There is no speech-to-text fallback.

• Private, removed, age-restricted and live videos are not supported. Sources can be up to three hours long.

• Process only content that you own or have the right to use. This project is not affiliated with YouTube or Google.

Development

npm install
npm run build
RAPIDAPI_KEY=your-key node dist/index.js

You can test with the MCP Inspector: npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector node dist/index.js.

License

MIT