Use youtube-dl to bulk download music from weblinks

youtube-dl can download much more than just youtube!

it has options to download video, then extract the audio only, or to download audio audio-only sites (soundcloud, bandcamp etc.)

for a long time i've been using a little script to download music with youtube-dl, straight into my Music folder.

youtube-dl can extract a lot of info from the download, add tags to the file, and generate a suitable download path and filename for one or multiple files.
ideally for me, that would be:
but unfortunately there's no way to get that info in a straightforward manner from all the different sites.

• youtube is not artist-centric at all
• soundcloud or bandcamp treat album/artist differently from each other

so my script still isn't perfect, but sufficiently so that i can automate the task of just right-clicking a link and download everything (complete albums, playlists, even one artists complete works), and still find the music afterwards.

so:

• for soundcloud or bandcamp it is fully automatic
• for youtube it asks to provide the name of a folder (typically the artist)
• everything else is treated like youtube

to make it better i would have to download metadata first, make some intelligent decisions, and only then download the actual media, and i did not want to do that (who knows when the site decides to throttle or block you, better not overdo it).

anyhow here's the script. enjoy.