Music Downloader

Automatically downloads music

This is a simple program to download music for you. You provide it a file containing a list of songs (one title per line). It searches for them on youtube, and then uses a youtube -> mp3 converter to download them as .mp3 files to a directory of your choice. It can also does other things like search for lyrics and plays local .mp3 files (I don't think this last one works on Windows).

This is not necessary, but you can also supply your own api key; you can easily get one by going to this link. Doing this will likely improve results slightly. See the "How to Run" section for more usage info.

How to Build

To build, clone this repository and then use cmake and make. The commands you need to run should be similar to those below

git clone https://github.com/NivenT/music-downloader
cd music-downloader
git submodule update --init --recursive
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../
make

How to Run

Run the program from terminal. The usage is detailed below.

./music-downloader

Usage:
    ./music-downloader (-h | --help)
    ./music-downloader [--api-key KEY | --api-file FILE] [--songs FILE] [--dest FOLDER] [-v | --verbose]
    ./music-downloader [--api-key KEY | --api-file FILE] --download SONGS... [--dest FOLDER] [-v | --verbose]
    ./music-downloader [--api-key KEY | --api-file FILE] --play-song SONGS... [--keep] [--show-lyrics] [-v | --verbose]
    ./music-downloader --yt-ids SONGS... [--dest FOLDER] [-v | --verbose]
    ./music-downloader --lyrics SONG [--save FILE] [--hide] [-v | --verbose]
    ./music-downloader --play FILES... [--dir FOLDER] [--show-lyrics] [--show-play-output] [-v | --verbose]
    ./music-downloader --play-from-ids SONGS... [--keep] [--show-lyrics] [-v | --verbose]

Options:
    -h --help                   Prints this message.
    --songs FILE                Text file containing songs to download [default: songs.txt]
    --dest FOLDER               Destination folder (where downloaded songs are saved) [default: songs/]
    -v --verbose                Use verbose output
    --lyrics SONG               Name of song to find the lyrics of [default: ]
    --save FILE                 File to save the lyrics to [default: ]
    --hide                      Doesn't print the lyrics to the terminal
    --download SONGS...         List of songs to download
    --play FILES...             List of MP3 files to play
    --dir FOLDER                The folder containing the files to play [default: .]
    --show-lyrics               Prints lyrics of song to the screen
    --show-play-output          Does not use quiet flag when running play command
    --play-song SONGS...        List of songs to search for online and then play if found
    --keep                      Keep a saved .mp3 of the song
    --api-key KEY               The YouTube API key to use
    --api-file FILE             A file containing the YouTube API key
    --yt-ids SONGS...           List of ids (the part after "v=" in their YouTube URL) of YouTube videos to download
    --play-from-ids SONGS...    List of ids of YouTube videos to download and then play

Depending on how you call it, the program will download music, find and print out lyrics, or play some songs. If it is not clear what any of the usage forms above does, then open an issue asking about it.

Do note that arguments wrapped in square brackets [] are optional for that usage case (take note of the default values in the description of the options), while argument wrapped in round brackets () are required for their usage case.

Examples include

• ./music-downloader --songs music.txt This will download all the songs listed in music.txt and save them in a folder named songs.
• ./music-downloader --api-file key.txt This will use the api-key found in key.txt to download all the songs in songs.txt and save them in a folder named songs.
• ./music-downloader This does the same thing as the above example, except it searches youtube directly instead of through the official api.
• ./music-downloader --lyrics "Thriller" This will search for the song Thriller and print its lyrics
• ./music-downloader --api-file key.txt --dest music -v This will download all the songs in songs.txt and save them in a folder named music. It will also print verbose output.
• ./music-downloader --api-file key.txt --download "canon in d" This will download Canon in D and save is in a folder names songs.
• ./music-downloader --play songs/thriller.mp3 --show-lyrics This will play Thriller from a local MP3 file, as well as search for and print its lyrics to the terminal.
• ./music-downloader --api-file key.txt --play-song "familia nicki" --show-lyrics This will download Familia and then immediately start playing it (it will also search for and print its lyrics). The downloaded song is deleted whenever it finishes playing (use --keep if you want to keep the mp3).

Advanced Examples

You could run the below command to play every song in a folder in a random order, and have the program print the lyrics of each song before playing it.

./music-downloader --play $(ls songs | shuf) --dir songs --show-lyrics

Since song files may have hard to remember names, if you want to play specific songs without typing out annoying file names, you can also run a command like below.

./music-downloader --play mj/$(ls mj | grep -i thriller) kw/$(ls kw | grep -i stronger)

The above will search for a song with thriller (respectively, stronger) in the title, and play it. Since the two songs were in different folders, instead of using "--dir", we have to include the folder with the name of the file.

Details

• The program retrieves the top 3 results for each song, and selects one to download
• You can specify --play multiple times. Either of the below is acceptable:
  • ./music-downloader --play thriller.mp3 --play manmirror.mp3
  • ./music-downloader --play thriller.mp3 manmirror.mp3
• --play-song and --download can also be given multiple songs in the same way.
• The program retrieves lyrics from multiple sites, scores them, and only keeps the lyrics with the highest score.
  • The scoring is based off of
    • order (top search results get a higher default score)
    • length (avoid sites with incomplete lyrics and favor sites that do things like label the chorus and different verses and whatnot)
    • similarity between url and song (try to make sure we're getting lyrics from the right song)
• When playing music using the --play flag, you can
  • skip a song by pressing Ctrl+c
  • pause a song by pressing Crtl+z and later resume by running % from your terminal
• Every now and then, the youtube -> mp3 converter stops working. When I notice this, I usually just find a different one to use and update the code, so if you run into this issue, either git pull or make a new YTConverter and then submit a pull request.
• If it fails to get a song, sometimes you can just run it a few more times and it will succeed at least once

TODO

This project is still not done/perfect. The following are things I would like to eventually do

• Make the program more interactive (menu or REPL like thing most likely)
• Add ability to supply Spotify credentials in order for program to download your saved songs

Note: These have been TODOs since practically day one, so don't hold your breath.