In order to transfer mp3s to an mp3 player that my kids use, I was planning for them to save songs to a youtube playlist, and then I'd download the entire playlist as mp3s. Then I'd transfer the mp3s to the player.
youtube-dl already has great support for downloading entire playlists. It's as simple as passing the playlist id:
youtube-dl -i PLwJ2VKmefmxpUJEGB1ff6yUZ5Zd7Gegn2
Did you know that kids' content on youtube can't be saved to a playlist? It's true, try to add this video to a playlist. You'll see that the "Save" button is grey-out. If you click it anyway, you get this message:
This action is turned off for content made for kids
with a link to this explanation.
The plan is that the kids could share youtube videos via email. The recipient email address would be set up for just this purpose. The following Python3 code reads all unread emails and scans them for youtube links. Those links are then passed to youtube-dl, which downloads the youtube content as a local mp3 file. Files can then be manually synced with the mp3 player.
You should be using 2FA! And that means to access your mailbox with code, you need to generate an app password.
Generating an app password for Gmail: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/185833
Assuming you have brew installed
brew install ffmpeg
brew install youtube-dl
I have no idea, but you'll need youtube-dl and ffmpeg on your $PATH.
Get the required source code from this rep
git clone https://github.com/philshem/py-youtube-dl-email.git
cd py-youtube-dl-email/
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
Before running the code, first
cd py-youtube-dl-email/
cp .env_example .env
And then with a text editor, add your private information:
USER_IMAP='imap.gmail.com'
USER_EMAIL='your@email.com'
USER_PASSWORD='your app password'
Now you are ready to go.
INFO: This script is designed for an email account that does nothing else but recieve youtube links. It won't delete any emails, but it does mark any unread email in the Inbox as read.
TO-DO: Change settings so emails are not necessarily marked as read.
As simple as
cd py-youtube-dl-email/
python3 run.py
mp3 files will be saved to a folder called mp3/ in the current working directory.