tmon, the [You]Tube Monitor, is a tool to make regular, local backups of your YouTube music playlists. It's pronounced te-mon, with te like in tetris and mon like in monitor.
Because it's happened many times already that music I liked (and that had been
custom made or remixed by artists I follow) was taken down or made private and
I lost it forever. So one day I said no more and downloaded all my playlist
using youtube-dl. But youtube-dl doesn't keep track of what has been
downloaded and what hasn't, that's why I made tmon.
Clone this repository, move it to somewhere permanent and make tmon.py
executable by running chmod +x tmon.py. Then hook it to your crontab file.
To do this, run crontab -e to open your crontab on an editor and then
add the line 0 * * * * /path/to/tmon.py to it. This will run tmon once per
hour. If you want to change the execution frequency, modify the cron line.
To select the playlist to backup, create the file config.tmon. The only contents
of that file should be the playlist id of the playlist you want to back up (the
id that follows the &list= on the YouTube URL).
If you want to execute tmon only once, run ./tmon.py. If you don't want to
cron it, you can run it this way whenever you want to back-up your playlist
(do it often!).
I recommend that, if you want to download a big playlist and then keep watch over it, you first run tmon by hand, download the list and then cron it to download the newly added videos.
If you are on Linux and you have notify-send installed, tmon will show a notification
every time a new file is downloaded.
tmon requires python3 and youtube-dl. But it gets the last version of youtube-dl itself and stores it in the tmon directory the first time it's ran, so you don't need to worry about that.
tmon places all downloaded files in a downloads directory within the tmon
directory.
tmon logs all its output to the log.tmon file. It also logs all downloaded
songs to history.tmon and all failed downloads to failed.tmon.
The .temp_list file is a temporal file with all your playlist URLs in there.
You can safely delete it, tmon will recreate it whenever it needs it.
Easy, just delete its url from history.tmon. Its url is listed in that file
along with the name of the file and the name of the video the file was generated from.
Even though youtube-dl doesn't download again what it has already downloaded if it finds a file with the same name in the destination directory, it has to go over the entire playlist trying to download each file to get the new files. And if you move the files out of the destination directory (for example, to your Music directory or to another computer), it will still download them again, wasting bandwidth, time and space. tmon keeps note of what it has already downloaded and it just downloads songs that haven't been downloaded in the past, without attempting to re-download those that you already have. It also writes down useful logs with information that youtube-dl doesn't provide in a human readable form, such as what videos failed to download, which ones were downloaded, which URL they were downloaded from, etc.
Yes, it's a pun.
If you have questions please do send me an email to lartu+tmon@lartu.net.
tmon is released under the MIT license.