I have a folder of MP3s, some of which date back to 1999, just a few years after the format was popularised. Most of them have utterly terrible names (think RIDEONAM.MP3). I think at this point they might even survive the heat death of the universe. And they’ll still be terribly-organised.
I find music on YouTube and autoconvert it to MP3 with yt-dlp and ffmpeg. It fetches new music from my personal “Favorite Music” playlist, downloads the highest quality audio source, converts it to MP3, embeds the metadata and cover art and tries to parse the artist and title as best as possible.
yt-dlp -x -f bestaudio --audio-quality 0 --audio-format mp3 --embed-thumbnail --add-metadata --metadata-from-title "%(artist)s - %(title)s" --playlist-start 1 --playlist-end 999 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=123abc -o "./files/%(artist)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s" --cookies-from-browser
Needs minimal adjustment sometimes if the title format is weird, but works 95% automatic. What I like most about this is the fact that music vanishes all the time from YouTube, but it doesn’t affect me. No one deletes the files from my harddrive but me.
Pro tip, make sure the browser you’re copying the cookies of isn’t logged in. Otherwise they may ban you sooner or later.
Is there a good guide to passing cookies to yt-dlp? Its one of those things I’ve been meaning to learn but never quite got around to yet…
I want to marry you.
Doing God’s work
TYVM
I have just been downloading as it is with
yt-dlp -x
(created an alias so I just typedl
) and then rename and sort the files manually as I find stuff is so often in different naming formats