metalfinder 2.1.6

scan a music directory to find concerts near a specified location

metalfinder is a command-line tool that scans a music directory to find concerts near a specified location.

Installation

Using pip

You can install metalfinder using pip:

$ pip install metalfinder

Using the Debian package

metalfinder is available in the Debian archive, starting with Debian 12 (Bookworm). You can install it by running:

$ apt install metalfinder

From source

You can install metalfinder from source using flit:

$ apt install flit
$ git clone https://gitlab.com/baldurmen/metalfinder
$ cd metafinder
$ flit install

Run without installing

If you already have all the required dependencies, you can run metalfinder directly from the source without installing it:

$ python3 -m metalfinder

API Providers

Bandsintown

To use the Bandsintown API provider, you will need a Bandsintown App ID. This is your API key and it should be kept private.

Other providers

Do you know a good website that tracks concerts and has a somewhat public API? If keys are not too hard to get, I’d be more than happy to implement it!

CLI options

Here is an example of how to use metalfinder:

$ export METALFINDER_BIT_APPID=mysecretapikey
$ metalfinder -d "/home/foo/Music" -o "/home/foo/metalfinder.atom" -l "Montreal"

The complete CLI parameters can be found below and in the man page:

Usage:
    metalfinder [-d <directory>] -o <output> -l <location> -b <app_id> [-c <cache>] [-m <date>] [--verbose]
    metalfinder (-h | --help)
    metalfinder --version

Options:
    -h  --help                   Show the help screen
    --version                    Output version information
    --verbose                    Run the program in verbose mode
    -d  --directory <directory>  Music directory to scan to create artist list
    -o  --output    <output>     Path to the desired output file. You can either
                                 chose a text file (foo.txt), a JSON file (foo.json)
                                 or an ATOM file (foo.atom)
    -l  --location  <location>   Name of the city to use when looking for concerts
    -b  --bit-appid <app_id>     Bandsintown App ID (API key). Optional when the
                                 METALFINDER_BIT_APPID environment variable is set.
    -c  --cache-dir <cache_dir>  Path to the cache directory. Defaults to
                                 $HOME/.cache/metalfinder/
    -m  --max-date  <date>       Max date in YYYY-MM-DD format (ISO 8601)

Environment Variables

metalfinder uses the following environment variables:

METALFINDER_BIT_APPID: Bandsintown API key. Useful to keep your API key from leaking when running metalfinder on the command line.

Running without a local directory

Even though metalfinder defaults to scanning a local directory to create a list of artists, it is possible to use an existing artist list created by some other program.

Using a subsonic server

This feature has not yet been implemented. See issue #15.

Using an MDP server

Since the --directory option is optional, if it is missing, only the cache directory will be inspected. In this directory, metalfinder looks for a file named artist_cache which consists of a list of artist names separated by new lines.

If you have an MPD server, you can generate this file with the help of the mpc client:

$ mpc list Artist > ~/.cache/metalfinder/artist_cache

Development

Running the test suite

You can run the test suite locally using pip and pytest:

$ python3 -m venv metalfinder
$ cd metalfinder
$ source bin/activate
$ git clone https://gitlab.com/baldurmen/metalfinder
$ cd metafinder
$ python3 -m pip install .[test]
$ python3 -m pytest

Building the man page

The man page for metalfinder can be generated using the rst2man command line tool provided by the docutils project:

$ rst2man manpage.rst metalfinder.1

License

This project was written by Louis-Philippe Véronneau and is licensed under the GNU GPLv3 or any later version.

The code to query the Bandsintown API (metalfinder/api/bandsintown.py) and the tests that accompany it (tests/test_api_bandsintown.py) come from the python-bandsintown project. These files were written by Chris Forrette and are licensed under the MIT license. As such, specific license headers have been added to them.