Listen a raw playlist with YouTube

May 22, 2015

Sometimes the easiest way to share a playlist is to just give a raw list of song titles and artists. However it’s not straightforward to actually play it.

I wrote a little script to ease the pain, playling each song from YouTube directly with mpv (my player of choice).

#!/bin/sh -e

go() {
    echo "Playing $1"

    # Force TTY input for controls even if titles are read from input
    mpv --vid=no "$(youtube-dl -g "ytsearch:$1" | tail -1)" < /dev/tty
}

# All arguments as a single space separated string
if [ -n "$*" ]; then
    go "$*"
    exit
fi

# Read one title per line
while read title; do
    go "$title"
done

You can see the latest source here.

You can either give a single song name as arguments (script arguments are concatenated), or from standard input, one title per line.

For example:

ytpl << EOF
born to be alive
girls got rhythm
EOF

Continuing a playlist

If you ever stop the script in the middle of a playlist, and want to continue later, just pipe the playlist file in sed:

sed '0,/<title>/d' < playlist | ytpl

Where <title> is the title of the song you stopped at.

Continuing a playlist

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