Get-YouTubeAlbum

Are you annoyed by how tedious it is to download single songs from YouTube to make an album? Are you also annoyed by how tedious the work is to manually edit the tags of the music?

Get-YouTubeAlbum automatically handles most of the tedious work involved in downloading an album from YouTube and lets you listen to your favourite music faster.

To download an album from YouTube, you simply need to:

1. Create a text file containing YouTube links to the songs you want, the Album name for the songs, and the Artist's name
2. Call Get-YouTubeAlbum with the text file

The text file you need to write is very simple. The following is an example of one:

Artist: Your Favourite Artist
Album: Greatest Hits
https://youtube.com/link_to_album_playlist_on_youtube

Get-YouTubeAlbum will download all of the audio from the YouTube links you specified into an Artist/Album folder, and will automatically correct all of the tags as well as embed the album art. It will automatically download all of the songs from a playlist of songs too, unless you don't want it to. Cool!

How to Install It

First, make sure you have a PowerShell profile.

Download or clone this repository, and run the included DeployModule.ps1 script. This copies the contents of the repository into your PowerShell Modules folder. You will also need to import the module in your PowerShell profile by adding the line Import-Module DownloadYouTubeAlbum to it. Without telling PowerShell to import it in your profile, the code will not be loaded when you launch PowerShell.

The deploy script will tell you which file you need to add the line to.

If you plan on doing any development to the code, the DeployModule.ps1 script is super useful to keep your PowerShell Modules up to date with the latest code.

Dependencies

The following programs must be installed manually for Get-YouTubeAlbum to work:

• python
• ffmpeg : youtube-dl uses this to convert downloaded audio into m4a or mp3 format.

The following programs are installed automatically if you don't have it, using Python's pip

• youtube-dl : Downloads audio from YouTube URLs.
• beets : Automatically fetches and updates metadata for downloaded audio.

How to Use It

Since this tool is written in PowerShell, it must be used from PowerShell. The tool's invocation is very simple:

Get-YouTubeAlbum [-AlbumManifest] <path to text file> [-NoPlaylist] [-PreferMP3]

If you want more information, you can get help in PowerShell:

Get-Help Get-YouTubeAlbum -Full

Beets Prompted me for Input, What do I do?

The process of downloading an album represented in the albumManifest file is almost always completely automatic. But sometimes, the underlying program beets will ask you to make a decision. This will happen if the songs names downloaded are not very similar to the actual song names in the album, or possibly if you mistyped the album or artist name in the text file.

If beets prompts you to enter input but you do not know how to proceed, I recommend reading this short page in the beets documentation to become familiar with your options for input in these situations. Don't be deterred by this! Beets is simple to interact with in these instances. You'll typically only need to press Enter, or tell beets to Apply the changes with "A".

How to Run the Tests

This project is tested using Pester.

To run the tests, install Pester, and invoke pester on the DownloadYouTubeAlbum folder:

Invoke-Pester .\DownloadYouTubeAlbum