An update on import from YouTube

We’ve made the decision to turn off the YouTube import feature in Descript for now. We want to share a bit of context about why.

Over the past several months, YouTube imports have become increasingly unreliable. Success rates dropped significantly, and many videos simply stopped importing altogether.

YouTube regularly updates its systems to prevent automated downloading. These changes directly affect tools like ours, and they can break or limit importing with little notice. We’ve evaluated short-term and long-term options, but at this point we are not able to provide a version of YouTube import that works consistently over the longterm.

We hope to revisit this in the future, especially if conditions change, but we don’t want to offer a feature that fails unpredictably or creates confusion.

You can still work with YouTube content in Descript you’ll just need to download the videos manually first, then import the files directly into your project. We know this adds an extra step, and we’re sorry for the inconvenience.

If you’re downloading your , the most reliable option is YouTube Studio, where you can download the original files you uploaded.

Here’s how:

Go to YouTube Studio and sign in with the account that owns the video.

Click in the left sidebar to view your uploads.

Hover over the video, click the menu (three dots), and select .

Drag the downloaded file into Descript or add it from the Project panel.

Using YouTube Studio is the most stable, YouTube-compliant way to access your own videos and avoids the issues that affected our previous import feature.