28 of 52: Coachella 2008 Media Download Script

Coachella is three weeks away, and just like last year the lineup is mostly bands I've never heard of. Also, just like last year, the Coachella website provides 1-2 tracks for most of the artists scheduled so you can get an idea of what they sound like. However the website interface doesn't make the aural exploration easy. It only lets you listen to the songs, not annotate them with your opinions. I was resorting to scribbling down artists I liked by hand last year. So I've been working on a couple of things to make it easier. The first of these is my project for this week, the second may be the project for next week if I get it finished.

Here is the first: a ruby script that saves all 210 of the Coachella tracks as normal MP3s that you can play anywhere. It even inserts the correct artist/title info and image file into the ID3 structure of the MP3. This makes it easier as you can use the iTunes (or equivalent) rating system as you listen to the songs and then sort by rating later to get a quick list of the artists you want to see at the festival.

This was written for OS X, but if you are ruby savvy on Windows you can easily get it to work there too. The main hiccup will be that it depends on a third party library in order to manage the id3 song info in the mp3s. Download this library from Here's the steps, sudo will sometimes ask for your password, just type it in when asked:

1. Save the pullem.rb script to your Music folder.
2. Open a Terminal window
3. Type: cd ~/Music
4. Type: sudo port install id3lib
5. Type: sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install id3lib-ruby -- --with-opt-dir=/opt/local
6. Type: sudo gem install xml-simple
7. Type: ruby pullem.rb

This will start the download. You'll end up with a little over 200 shiny new MP3s.

The port install id3lib part is what installs the third party library. In order for that to work you have to have DarwinPorts installed. And in order to have DarwinPorts, you will have installed the OS X Developer's Toolkit that came on your OS X DVDs when you bought your Mac. The toolkit is not installed by default.

If you are on Windows you can download a binary of the id3 library from sourceforge.

Comments

[Paul]

This is awesome, thanks!