SCGet Status Update

Recently both Josh and I have been busy with soundcloud-get (scget) and it has been coming along quite nicely. We feel confident that it is currently at a stable place and are looking into how to release a python project and tag it as version 1.0.

The current command line options that scget supports are:

• -u <song_url>- Downloads a song from the specified song url. This parameter can be provided multiple times.
• -a <artist_url> - Downloads all songs from the specified artist url.
• -o <folder> - Folder to download all songs to. If not provided or doesn't exist, all songs are downloaded to the current directory.
• -m - If provided, downloads are multi-threaded.
• -st <track_name> - Searches for tracks that are similar to the provided name and prints their titles.
• -sa <artist_name> - Searches for artists that are similar to the provided name and prints their names.
• -l <number> - Limits the number of results pulled back from either the search track or search artist queries. If not provided, each search defaults to 20 results.

Once we figure out how to release this project we do have a few ideas of what still needs to come for this project:

• Ways for the user to choose songs/artists to download from the provided search results.
• Being able to provide a yaml configuration instead of having so many command line arguments.
• Add a default download directory structure instead of just the current directory.
• Thread pooling for multi-threaded downloads to better manage the many download threads.
• Track down Unicoder Coercion errors that happen on occasion.

Though, for now it is all working fine and as expected for almost all cases which is why we want to release it now and then tackle these other issues.

Remember you can always watch the progress of this project on our github page.

SCGet

I currently started to work on a new side project, scget. It's a command line tool that will allow users to easily download songs from SoundCloud. SoundCloud does allow downloads from the browser, but that requires one to navigate to the page, click download on each song they want, and specify an output folder. This command line tool is going to be simple, yet powerful alternative to downloading from the browser.

Some of the options that have already been thought of are:

• Download a single song

 scget <trackUrl>  

• Download multiple songs

 scget <trackUrl1> <trackUrl2> ... <trackUrlN>  

• Download all songs from a particular artist

 scget -dj <userUrl>  

• And of course, the ability to specify a download folder

 scget <trackUrl> -o <folder>  

Obviously this would be easier than having to navigate the webpage because you could just queue up a bunch of urls to download and then hit go. It will do all of the processing behind the scenes while you get back to what you were doing before.

For this project, I am working in collaboration with Josh Branchaud on this project because not only are we great friends, but we both love SoundCloud. You can follow our progress on this command line tool on our github page.

P.S. - If you have any suggestions about other functionality that should be included in this tool feel free to leave it in a comment.

Learning Gradle

Currently, I use apache maven to handle all of my dependency management, though lately I have heard much interest in a new project: gradle. After reading some posts about it, it seems that not only does it handle dependencies like maven does, but also helps the build cycle be much better with the use of groovy scripts. This should be interesting because maven only allows certain life cycles to be ran and if you want to deviate from that, you need to write your own plugins.

I don't know what to expect while messing around with gradle, but I'm currently following the tutorials and have made it to chapter 7 thus far. To follow my progress, you can watch my github gradle project.