Adding HLS assembly support

[willb0]

I see HLS assembly support mentioned in the README for songs without downloadable links. What kind of effort would this take?

I can work on this, would enjoy some helpful pointers in the right direction

[3jackdaws]

When I first encountered this issue, I looked for existing python libraries that assembled HLS streams and I didn’t find any.

That was a while ago, so if you can find third party libs that do the work of assembling HLS streams, I’d be willing to accept them as dependencies. Otherwise, you’d need to read up on HLS and how they represent segmented media files and download the parts and concatenation them into full files.

[willb0]

cheers, circling back to work on this over the summer.

spent a brief period researching how to implement this when you first responded, but realized I would have to spend significant time and dropped it/forgot to respond. I'll update on progress and hopefully open a PR, otherwise will close

[ruffish]

I'm super new to this and don't really understand what your talking about. But I found this library which claims to compile HLS into a file. Not sure if its relevant for what you guys need.

https://github.com/zmwangx/caterpillar

[PatrykMis]

As a workarround you can pass track URL to YT-DLP. It parses HLS streams properly and it's written in Python, too.

[muloka]

Could something like this work?

import os
import subprocess

# ...


class Track:
    # ...

    def get_hls_url(self):
        """Get url"""
        for transcode in self.media["transcodings"]:
            if transcode["format"]["protocol"] == "hls":
                return transcode["url"] + "?client_id=" + self.client.client_id
        return None

    def download(self, path=None, filename=None):
        """Download track to file"""
        if not path:
            path = os.getcwd()
        if not filename:
            filename = self.title + ".mp3"
        if not filename.endswith(".mp3"):
            filename += ".mp3"
        if not os.path.exists(path):
            os.makedirs(path)
        url = self.get_hls_url()

        ## Download HLS stream using ffmpeg
        subprocess.run(["ffmpeg", "-i", url, f"{path}/{filename}"])
        return f"{path}/{filename}"

[SteezyE]

Could something like this work?

import os
import subprocess

# ...


class Track:
    # ...

    def get_hls_url(self):
        """Get url"""
        for transcode in self.media["transcodings"]:
            if transcode["format"]["protocol"] == "hls":
                return transcode["url"] + "?client_id=" + self.client.client_id
        return None

    def download(self, path=None, filename=None):
        """Download track to file"""
        if not path:
            path = os.getcwd()
        if not filename:
            filename = self.title + ".mp3"
        if not filename.endswith(".mp3"):
            filename += ".mp3"
        if not os.path.exists(path):
            os.makedirs(path)
        url = self.get_hls_url()

        ## Download HLS stream using ffmpeg
        subprocess.run(["ffmpeg", "-i", url, f"{path}/{filename}"])
        return f"{path}/{filename}"

I got something similiar to work. After obtaining the client_id and track_authorization token, you can get a link to the .m3u8 file and download it (user agent / headers should look legit, otherwise soundcloud might block your request). The .m3u8 file can be supplied to ffmpeg (additionally whitelist the necessary protocols) to obtain a .mp3 file. *download with ffmpeg