has youtube dropped small (48k) audio (dash) streams

[al_9x]

the are not longer in the dash menu

[therube]

It appears so.

Dropping back to flashgot-1.5.5.95rc1.xpi does not bring them back.
Using a site like http://en.savefrom.net/ is only seeing "Audio MP4 128".

And I'm seeing in some cases, (dash) webm where it had always only been mp4 in the past.

"Small" (HE-AAC I suppose more generally) was fine, is fine, generally great, depending on use cases.

The only thing I find is that during playback, with most players, MPlayer included, if you jump through the track, you'll hear clips, chirps, when you jump.

That seems to be a fault in the decoder? Perhaps if you compiled with a better decoder, FhG I think it is, the issue wouldn't be there? But you cannot distribute pre-compiled binaries with FhG.

[therube]

If all you were looking for was a low bitrate...

If a clip has a .3gp version, the complete clip, audio & video may very well be smaller then the Dash/.m4a (medium) & the .3gp will (likely) have .m4a audio too (& probably even smaller then "small").

So you to just pull the (low bit-rate) audio from the .3gp.