SoundCloud downloader

Fri Mar 17 2023

Quick writeup of this project that I built tonight. I had just finished adding ID3 tags manually to a few mp3s and decided to make something to speed up the process for songs on SoundCloud.

I wrote it in Typescript and outsourced a lot of the hard stuff to random npm packages. Reminder to future me: if ts-node isn't working, try adding this to the tsconfig:

"ts-node": {

    "esm": true,

    "experimentalSpecifierResolution": "node"

}

Anyway, it parses command line arguments with ts-command-line-args, fetches the song data with soundcloud-scraper, and writes the ID3 tags with node-id3. There's some other utilities too like chalk, mkdirp, rimraf, and sanitize-filename. Why reinvent the wheel?

We read the passed urls and files possibly containing more urls, then download the thumbnail and mp3 for each one and write the ID3 tags.

I haven't looked into creating a binary to make it more portable yet. I think I'll need to change the out and temp paths to be less hardcoded (right now they're relative to import.meta.url? I'm not sure how that would work after packaging everything).

I might try to add searching for tracks by name as well. Other than that, it works good enough for me. You can use it if you want. Thanks for reading.