beets-yapl

beets plugin to parse a yaml playlist format and compile it into the near universally supported M3U format.

M3U playlists are inherently fragile, breaking at the slightest change in a file's path. This plugin utilises beetDreamers' queries to define playlists in a simple yaml format, where you can provide precisely the level of detail required to unambiguously find the song you're after.

A playlist can be written as:

name: Christmas
tracks:
  # The library only contains one version of this song, so this is enough.
  - title: Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)
    artist: Darlene Love
  # The library contains multiple recordings of this track, so let's include
  # the year to get the right version.
  - artist: Withered Hand
    title: Real Snow
    year: 2013
  # Typing Japanese characters is finicky, so let's just use the track's
  # MusicBrainz ID
  - mb_trackid: dafff56a-f327-4de5-ab35-633c8863857f

which will be compiled into an M3U playlist looking something like:

#EXTM3U
#PLAYLIST:Christmas
#EXTINF:166, Darlene Love - Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)
../Darlene Love/Non-Album/Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).flac
#EXTINF:202, Withered Hand - Real Snow
../Withered Hand/Non-Album/Real Snow.flac
#EXTINF:266, クレイジーケンバンド - クリスマスなんて、大嫌い!!なんちゃって
../クレイジーケンバンド/Non-Album/クリスマスなんて、大嫌い!!なんちゃって.m4a

Getting Started

Installation

To install via pip: Run pip install beets-yapl.

If you're on an Arch-based distro, you can install it from the AUR as beets-yapl-git.

Configuration

Enable the plugin by adding it to your plugin option in the beets configuration and configure the plugin.

plugins:
- ...
- yapl

yapl:
  input_path: ~/Music/playlists/
  output_path: ~/Music/playlists/
  relative: true

input_path: path decides what directory yapl will search for yapl files. output_path: path decides where to output the compiled m3u files. Can be the same as input_path. relative: bool controls whether to use absolute or relative filepaths in the outputted M3U files.

Run

Once configured, run beet yapl to compile all the playlists in your input_path directory. Warnings will be issued for any ambiguous or resultless queries and these tracks will be left out of the output.

$ beet yapl
== Parsing 13 playlists ==
christmas.yapl: 2 results for query: ['artist:Withered Hand', 'title:Real Snow']
favourites.yapl: No results for query: ['title: How I Won My Stripes', 'artist: JOKES']
== 13 playlists compiled ==