beets-yapl

beets plugin to parse a yaml playlist format and compile it into the near universally supported M3U format.

M3U playlists are inherently fragile, breaking at the slightest change in a file's path. This plugin utilises beets' queries to define playlists in a simple yaml format, where you can provide precisely the level of detail required to unambiguously find the song you're after.

A playlist can be written as:

name: Christmas
tracks:
  - artist: Withered Hand
    title: Real Snow
    singleton: true
  - artist: Withered Hand
    title: It's a Wonderful Life
    album: Chrimble madness
  - artist: U.N.P.O.C.
    title: Icelandic Leopard Cat

which will be compiled into an m3u playlist looking something like:

#EXTM3U
#PLAYLIST:Christmas
#EXTINF:202, Withered Hand - Real Snow
../Withered Hand/Non-Album/Real Snow.flac
#EXTINF:350, Withered Hand - It's a Wonderful Life
../Withered Hand/Non-Album/It's a Wonderful Life.mp3
#EXTINF:180, U.N.P.O.C. - The Icelandic Leopard Cat
../Fence Collective, The/0000 - Little Wonkey (FZ4)/02 The Icelandic Leopard Cat.mp3

Getting Started

Install the plugin. So far it is only published on the AUR as beets-yapl-git. Pip installation will arrive once I've had time to look into publishing on PyPI.

Enable the plugin by adding it to your plugin option in the beets configuration and configure the plugin.

plugins:
- ...
- yapl

yapl:
  input_path: /home/nichobi/Music/playlists/
  output_path: /home/nichobi/Music/playlists/
  relative: true

input_path: path decides what directory yapl will search for yaml files.
output_path: path decides where to output the compiled m3u files. Can be the same as input_path.
relative: bool controls whether to use absolute or relative filepaths in the outputted M3U files.

Once configured, run beet yapl to compile all the playlists. Warnings will be issued for any ambiguous or resultless queries and these tracks will be left out of the output.

$ beet yapl
Parsing christmas.yaml
Multiple results for query: ['artist:Withered Hand', 'title:Real Snow']
No results for query: ['artist:UNPOC', 'title:Icelandic Leopard Cat']
Writing christmas.m3u