Downloading and Editing Music

This serves as our documentation for how we manage our local music libraries on Linux.

Acquiring Music

You are welcome to use any method you wish to LEGALLY acquire music. We would never encourage the criminal act of piracy. But maybe you’re an artist and you want to archive or back up your own music - in that case, here you go:

yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 <url> --cookies-from-browser firefox

Omit the --cookies-from-browser firefox if you do not need authentication (auth is required for age-restricted content, for example).

Editing Metadata

The specific meta tags you may need to set will vary depending on the music software you use. We have confirmed that TIT2 is read as the title and TPE1 is read as the artist when using Amberol on Linux and Musicolet on Android. Using -t and -a might work.

id3v2 "/path/to/song" --TIT2 "Song Title" --TPE1 "Song Artist"

Adding Cover Image

Download the image (we have confirmed JPEGs work) that you want to apply to the song, then run:

eyeD3 --add-image="/path/to/img":FRONT_COVER "/path/to/mp3"

Copying to Android Locally

You’ll need to replace your paths and your device ID to match your local setup, but:

adb -s 192.168.12.105:5555 push music/* /storage/self/primary/Music