Gunloader

Split YouTube videos into songs, all tagged and in your favourite audio format.

Introduction

This project allows you to split long YouTube videos into separate songs! You can tag them with metadata and encode them in your preferred audio format.

At the moment, the project consists of two components:

The offline CLI (Command Line Interface) program that downloads and splits up the YouTub video for you; and
The online Web UI which lets you specify the song information and start/end times within a YouTube video.

Features

Encodes a long video's audio into separate audio tracks
Support for FLAC, MP3, Vorbis, Opus and AAC encoding formats
Tagging abilities (title, album, artist(s), comment, genre, etc.)
Downloading using YouTube-DL, or using an existing video file
Embedded cover art, using thumbnails derived from the provided video, or using an existing image
Batch processing of multiple album videos from YouTube or local videos
Song information can be read from a file, or from a YouTube video's chapters/timeline
Optional lossless splitting of the video's original audio, without any re-encoding whatsoever

Usage

To make things simpler, give the Web GUI a try here! It will let you organise your tracks (or use other people's existing records). Simply double click on Gunloader, and specify the ID that the Web GUI will give you.

For advanced instructions, please refer to the USAGE document. Linux users may have to run ./gunloader through the terminal to see the wizard.

Installation

Download the latest release from here, and also make sure you have the dependencies you need installed. See below for further information!

Dependencies

Download whichever dependency you need for your use-case:

yt-dlp for downloading videos (youtube-dl can also be used)
ffmpeg for audio & cover art extraction
lame for MP3 encoding w/ metadata
flac for FLAC encoding w/ metadata
oggenc for Vorbis encoding w/ metadata
opusenc for Opus encoding w/ metadata
ffmpeg for AAC encoding w/ metadata

If you need to specify a dependency's executable to the program, do it like so:

./gunloader \
    # records file
    --album '~/album.txt' \

    # paths to dependencies
    --ffmpeg "c:\\ffmpeg.exe" \
    --flac '/bin/flac' \
    --youtube-dl ~/yt-dlp \

    # mass fill with optional metadata
    --genre "OP/ED/IN/IM" \
    --artist "Various" --artist "Artists" \
    --comment 'Very Important Music'

FAQ

It's called gunloader because it was originally meant to be used to download compilations by Gundober.

This repository's numskull of an author realised only afterwards that this solution works for any YouTube album video.