SoundcloudSet Extractor seems to ignore --flat-playlist

[ChrisK2]

We always get a playlist with fully resolved individual clips back:

youtube-dl -J --flat-playlist 'https://soundcloud.com/sarahdonner/sets/that-is-a-pegasus'

Is this intended?

[jaimeMF]

It just happens that soundcloud gives all the playlist and track info in a single file, so we extract all the info from it.

The internal option we use for --flat-playlist documents the behaviour (if we get the info we return it and if we get a link we'll return the link without info), but the CLI flag help message may need a reword.

[ChrisK2]

Mh, okay, it would be nicer if the contents of a field would be somewhat consistent, but seems like it can't be helped. I added a workaround to our script.

Thanks for the help, I'll close this later if there is no further discussion on this.

[phihag]

I'm not sure what you mean by workaround in this context. The extraction is already done in these cases. There is no guarantee that there is a webpage_url entry present.

For example, some services may not have a URL (or even a view) for an individual video/song, but just always show the playlist. While youtube-dl could generate a token for each playlist entry, that token would be extremely inefficient because extraction would involve

1. getting the playlist name from the token
2. downloading the whole playlist
3. traversing all entries prior to the one the user is interested in (in cases where extractors require us to follow the same route every time).
4. Actually downloading the information about the song

A common scenario where this happens is that one where the playlist entries are different acts of a single TV episode. For many services, there is some way to fetch information about a single playlist entry, but there are no guarantees about that.

[ChrisK2]

I guess this can be closed.