MusicDL

MusicDL Logo

Inspiration

Being a music lover, I wanted a quick an easy way to download music on YouTube and save it as an mp3 file on my computer to play locally with basic tools, since a subscription was too expensive in my country. Whoever I talked to had a similar experience that I did, which is what pushed me to make this project!

What it does

MusicDL is a simple python script that scrapes YouTube for the query you enter and downloads the top result in an mp3 format in your ~/Music directory. To do this, it makes use of yt-dl and ffmpeg!

How we built it

I have built it using the requests, beautifulsoup4, youtube_dl, and ffmpeg libraries.

Challenges we ran into

First of all, it was difficult to include a progress-bar when the file was downloading. Plus, as the script was intended to be as cross-platform as possible, it was also tough to figure out a path for the music directory. For the initial version, I struggled to pick which features I wanted to build in such a short time, which is why the project will also transform in the near future!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I was using ffmpeg and yt_dl for the first time, which is why I am extremely proud of learning new technologies. I am also proud to help even a single person in completing their task so that it becomes easy to serve their music taste. Overall, the project helped me inculcate a sense of open-source responsibilities as well as serve my and the greater interests

What we learned

I learnt that building even a small script is not as easy as it appears. Moreover, to get it working wihtout any issues takes a lot of time, even for such a project. I learnt to respect all developers and coders in the entire world for their efforts in building utilities we love so much!

What's next for MusicDL

I plan to build a GUI for MusicDL as well! Along with this, I also plan to add a menu-based approach with support for spotify and youtube songs, playlists, albums and much more. I would also like to add custom save locations for music and the abilities to choose quality and speech. In the future for MusicDL, I would like to publish it as a PyPI package!