Apollo

Apollo is a webservice for interacting with an MPD instance and downloading music to it.

Features:

• Download new music to a remote MPD library using youtube-dl. Youtube-dl supports a huge number of streaming services, among them SoundCloud, Bandcamp, and YouTube.
• Transcode music remotely to several formats using ffmpeg.
• Export raw and transcoded music for offline listening.
• MPD playlist manipulation.

Setup

Build Apollo in a cabal sandbox. The bundled runserver.sh script can be used to launch the server. It takes as one argument the Apollo database directory to operate in. This directory must contain (at least) three items.

1. music is the MPD music directory or a symlink thereto;
2. transcoded is where Apollo stores transcoded tracks;
3. archives is where Apollo stores music export archives.

To connect to MPD, Apollo takes command line arguments specifying the connection parameters. runserver.sh parses the MPD_HOST environment variable to construct the parameters to Apollo. If no MPD_HOST variable is set, then runserver.sh defaults to localhost with no password on port 6600. Recall that the MPD_HOST variable is of the form PASSWORD@HOST:PORT.

Usage

A number of scripts are bundled with this repository for some common Apollo workflows. The scripts generally require the jq and curl programs. The scripts expect an environment variable APOLLO_URL_BASE to be set, and to be of the form https://apollo.example.org:8080, i.e. consisting of the scheme and hostname (and optionally the port number).

• apollo-dl - download music to the MPD library using youtube-dl

  The script expects two positional arguments, a path of the form Artist/Album followed by a URL. The album part of the path may be omitted. If the -c switch is supplied, then the URL can be omitted; in this case it is taken from the clipboard (via xclip, which must be installed).

• apollo-export - export a subset of the current playlist

  This script facilitates exporting (a portion of) the current playlist. First, the playlist is downloaded and opened in the editor given by the EDITOR variable. The user can filter the playlist to select only those tracks they wish to export. When the user quits their editor, the selected tracks are transcoded (by default to MP3 V2), archived, and the archive is downloaded to apollo-export.zip.