Download music asynchronously using yt-dlp given a list of songs, including the name, author and category. This script will help you easily synchronize / version control your local music across your machines by storing a description of all your songs as a lisp list.

(musync
 (list
  (list
   :name "Immanuel"
   :author "Tony Anderson"
   :category "Instrumental"
   :link "https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=yi2IdZuSgRI&si=Xus4F44e_qad7W8l")
  (list
   :name "Interstellar"
   :author "Hanz Zimmer"
   :category "Soundtracks"
   :link "https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=1ki7oATXdXc&si=0c52s2Ij25d-aKGm")
  (list
   :name "Letters"
   :author "Silent Hill 2"
   :category "Soundtracks"
   :link "https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=acQrKPVA32I&si=qovVxkZCWpYaWqWv")
  (list
   :name "Mazurka"
   :category "Folk"
   :link "https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=KcNY1qLBA2o&si=xywKmFgoY-qorwmy")
  :async t))

I usually download music locally. I do this in part because I want to be able to listen to my favourite music offline and in part because I want to use emacs as my music player, as everybody does. So I have a lot of songs stored on my computer and I can happily enjoy them in peace and without a browser. Sounds good, but there are some complications with this system.

The first problem arises when I am using multiple machines. If I download some music on my desktop and in a later time I download some other music on my laptop, then I have a synchronization problem where I don’t know where a certain song is stored. Moreover, if I distro hop or my disks fail, then I need to manually download again all the songs, which is a lot of work considering the number of songs I have, and I don’t even know all the songs I have. I could always use an external drive that I can bring with me all the time, but that seems overkill.

To summarize, I needed a way to synchronize my music. I could use rsync, this is probably the better solution, however I thought that I could have something simpler that does not require me to have songs already downloaded in order to synchronize them. What I really want is a description of all the songs I want to have, including their name and directory (I use directories as playlists). Then, I would just synchronize this description file via git and download new songs given the file If It was modified.

Hence, I took a couple of hours to write this script. I am not completely new to elisp having already written a more serious project tiny-rss, however It’s been some time since I wrote some elisp code. Overall, I think this works well for me and It solved my problem.

The code is published under the GPLv3 license. This program has nothing to do with similarly named projects, I did not look at other repositories for this project not even for inspiration. Yes, this thing has been done before but I do not care.