GMusic Organizer

A node.js playlist organizer for google play music running in a terminal. Powered by blessed and playmusic.

Installation

The dependency tree contains native node.js modules. Parts of them need to be compiled during installation.

Compilation requires a C++ toolchain (compiler/linker) on your machine. See node-gyp for installation instructions.

Ubuntu 16.04

sudo apt-get install libasound-dev

sudo npm install -g gmusic-organizer

Mac OS

sudo npm install -g gmusic-organizer

Usage

After installation restart your terminal window. Start with gmusic-organizer.

When starting the first time, you need to enter your google credentials.

If the login step fails, you might need to:

• allow less secure apps to work with your account
• create an app specific password (usually required when two-factor authentication is enabled )

After a successful authentication, a master token is created and stored in ~/.gmusic-organizer/credentials.

Controls

Hit h to get a list of available controls.

General

 h             help (show this window) 
 F5            refresh
 q             quit
 /             search for track in current view
 t             tag a track
 f             filter all tracks view by tag
 i             show track info

Built in player

 p             play songs 
 s             stop playing 
 P             pause playing 
 R             resume playing

Playlist management
 
 n             create new playlist 
 del/backspace delete playlist
 d             download playlist to disk (into ~/gmusic)

Playlist manipulation
 
 C-c           copy song to clipboard 
 C-x           cut song to clipboard 
 C-v           paste song into playlist
 del/backspace remove song from playlist

Tagging

The core idea of the gmusic-organizer is organizing songs and creating playlists by tags. Songs can be tagged with the t shortcut key.

Currently it is not possible to change the list of avilable tags with the gmusic-organizer. However the tags are defined in this file: ~/.gmusic-organizer/tags. Edit this file to add/remove tags.

Original file content:

{
  "tags": {
    "lang": [
      "en",
      "de",
      "fr",
      "it"
    ],
    "genre": [
      "electro",
      "pop",
      "indie",
      "folk",
      "schlager",
      "hiphop"
    ]
  },
  "playlistPrefix": "zz [tag] "
}

Tags per song are stored in tag playlists. So song tags are shared across multiple devices.

These tag playlists are hidden in gmusic-organizer. However they will be visible on other gmusic clients (e.g. your smartphone). They are identified by a special playlistPrefix. I picked zz [tag] for the moment so that these playlist show up at the end of my smartphone device.

Logging/Debugging

Each session creates a logfile at ~/.gmusic-organizer/log.txt. Inspect this file if you experience any problems.