Music toolbox

This is a small toolbox of utilities written in Python 2 that help users groom their music collection.

What's in the box

The box contains a number of utilities. The main one is syncplaylists.

syncplaylists: the playlist synchronizer

syncplaylists takes a number of file lists / playlists in the command line, and a destination directory, then synchronizes all the songs in the playlists to the destination directory, with optional modifications to the files and their names as they are copied to the destination directory. syncplaylists preserves your music collection's directory structure, and allows you to define what formats you want your music to be transcoded to.

Run syncplaylists --help for more information.

syncplaylists accepts a simple YAML file in your home directory, by default read from file transcoding.yaml in $HOME/.config/musictoolbox (although you can change which file to use with the -c command line parameter). The file must say how you want things to be transcoded (documentation on the config format is forthcoming):

# cat ~/.config/musictoolbox/transcoding.yaml
policies:
- source: ogg
  # Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Opus files to be copied directly
  pipeline: [copy]
- source: *
  # Everything else to transcode to MP3.  MP3 files
  # themselves will be copied since the copy transcoder
  # is the one with the cheapest "cost".
  target: mp3

Once you've created the YAML config file, here's the quickstart version of how you actually use the tool:

[user@laptop ~/Music]$ syncplaylists -vd Playlists/*.m3u /mnt/usbdrive/Music/

That will copy all songs listed in all M3U playlists within your ~/Music/Playlists folder directly into /mnt/usbdrive/Music, preserving the directory structure you have.

Any playlist you specify as parameter can also be a symlink. If they are, then any relative paths within the playlist will be resolved in relation to the target of the symlink, rather than the symlink itself. This lets you symlink album playlists to a folder with favorite playlists of yours, and then use syncplaylists directly with those symlinked favorites.

genplaylist: the playlist generator

genplaylist generates playlists. Run genplaylist --help for more information.

Requirements / dependencies

This is a list of requirements for most of these utilities to work:

• python3-packaging
• python3-networkx
• python3-pyxdg
• python3-psutil
• python3-mutagen
• ffmpeg
• GStreamer