Two reels, two outcomes, no obvious difference
A editor I know was pulling reference clips off Instagram for a mood board. Eight reels, six saved cleanly, two came back as a file that would not open.
Same account, same day, same tool. The difference was not the tool.
Reels are not one thing
Instagram serves a reel differently depending on where it sits. A reel on a public creator account is straightforward. A reel that is part of a collaboration carries two credits and is served from a slightly different path. A reel reposted from someone else is a third case again.
Tools are usually built for the first case, because that is the one everyone tests with. The other two work often enough that nobody notices, right up until the file comes back broken.
The three cases, and what to do
Public creator reel. The easy one. Any working tool handles it.
Collaboration reel. Two accounts are credited. Some downloaders read the primary credit and stop, which returns an incomplete file or an error. Look for a tool that reads the post rather than the account.
Reposted reel. The clip exists under a different account than the one that made it. This usually works, but the audio can come back muted if the tool grabbed a version that had the music stripped for copyright reasons on the reposter's side.
What I use
For the whole range of cases I keep ReelFetch. It reads the post itself rather than the profile, so collaborations and reposts go through the same path as a plain public reel, and the audio comes with it. No login, no app.
Stories are a different job and it handles those separately, which is the right way round.
How it goes
Use the post's share link, not the profile link.
Paste it in and let it read the post.
Save the file and open it once before you use it anywhere.
Step three matters more than it sounds. Opening it right away is how you catch a bad file while you still remember which link it came from.
Two questions
Why did one file not open at all? Almost always a collaboration or repost case where the tool read the wrong path. Try the same link in a tool that reads the post.
Can I get the original audio instead of the mixed one? No. You get the audio that is on the post, which is what most people actually want.
Short version
Six out of eight is the tell. Nothing was wrong with the tool, and nothing was wrong with the reels. The tool only knew how to handle one of the three shapes a reel can take.
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