Rust-based tool for processing XSPF playlists, extracting metadata embedded in the filenames, and exporting this data into various formats that are easier to use
$ xspf_tools {mode} {in.xspf} [{outfile/dir}] [.sub-mode. ...command-args...]
where {mode} is one of the following:
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help - Prints this text
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dump - Prints summary of the important identifying info gained from the playlist
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runtime - Prints summary of the total running time of the playlist
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list - Writes the file paths of all tracks in the playlist to {outfile}
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json - Extracts the useful info out of the file, and dumps to JSON format in {outfile} for easier handling
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copy - Copies all the files named in the playlist to the nominated folder {outdir} Their names will get prefixed with metadata such as the track number and date.
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convert - Similar to copy, but it takes an additional {format} arg (command-args[0]) specifying the output format to convert everything to. Any additional arguments after that are passed directly to FFMPEG (assuming FFMPEG is on the path).
This repo takes advantage of Rust's standard package-manager/build tool, cargo
Simply clone/download this repo, then run:
$ cargo run-- To build and run the tool. See [Usage]#Usage section above for parameters to pass to the binary.$ cargo test-- To run the tests
The test_files directory contains a number of sample .xspf files that this tool is designed to process.
Over the past year, I recorded/composed over 3 hours of music for fun and as a way to de-stress during a hectic few months of writing up and defending my thesis. These tracks (each ~ 1 minute long) were saved into a bunch of XSPF playlists (one per month), in a carefully curated order, to facilitate easy playback of these sequences in VLC. Thanks to these tracks/playlists, I remained enough sanity to plough through the thesis writing (over 260 pages of it) and make it out alive.
As one of my post-graduation projects, I figured it would be fun to try and share this collection with the world in the form of some automatically-generated music videos. But since we're talking about several hundred tracks here, it's not really that fun manually hunting down and loading all these files into a video sequencer, then manually extracting the useful information out of the filenames to populate various slots in the titlecards used to introduce/identify each track. Hence, the need for some automation!
Normally, I'd have written such a project in Python (and in some ways, it would've been easier). However, I soon realised that this was a great opportunity to try writing some real code in Rust. I'd also been interested in working on some "real" projects in Rust for a while - as simple toy programs really don't go far enough when it comes to trying to figure out the ins and outs of a language - so it seemed like a great idea to accomplish both goals by using both on this project!
Disclaimer: This tool is meant to process the XSPF playlists generated by VLC, to extract out the list of tracks / file-paths. It is not however meant to be a general solution for handling any/all XSPF playlists, but rather, a specific set of playlists that have specially formatted filenames. I currently have no plans/intentions to make this tool support any other folder structures/file naming schemes, but you are welcome to do so in your own forks.
-- Joshua Leung (@Aligorith), March 2018