tapedeck

Vibe coded, built for one person. tapedeck is written with AI assistance for my own setup and comes with no guarantees. You are welcome to try it and to file issues; I will try to fix them.

 ListenBrainz ──▶ MusicBrainz ──▶ yt-dlp ──▶ tags ──▶ Artist/Album (Year)/01 - Title.opus
   playlists        metadata      audio      lofty           │
                                                             ├──▶ playlists/*.m3u8
                                                             └──▶ Plex playlist

I used Explo for this and wanted a few things it doesn’t do: a real library layout instead of a flat folder of files, a database so a song that shows up in three weekly playlists is downloaded once, a daemon with a CLI that talks to it, and output that scripts (or an AI agent) can parse. tapedeck is that, in Rust. The binary is called td.

What you get

• A library, not a dump. Lidarr-style path templates: {album_artist}/{album} ({year})/{track:02} - {title}.{ext} by default, yours if you prefer.
• Metadata from MusicBrainz, keyed by the recording IDs ListenBrainz already gives you. Consistent artist, album, year and track number, and a hard guarantee against duplicates.
• Tags written by tapedeck, not by whatever the download site had. Album artist and track artist are kept apart, so featured guests don’t split an album across folders.
• An m3u8 per playlist, kept in step with the playlist on Plex and readable by any player, with last week’s copy archived. Tracks that drop out of a playlist stay in your library.
• Downloads from YouTube Music’s song results first, matched by length against the MusicBrainz recording and checked again after the download, so you get the album audio rather than the music video with the two-minute intro.
• Plex sync that scans the library, matches files and recreates the playlist.
• Plays, too: Enter in the TUI plays a track and queues the rest through mpv, locally or streamed from the NAS, and scrobbles to ListenBrainz so next week’s playlists know.
• Use it from your laptop: the daemon serves its commands and the audio over HTTP behind a token, so td tui on another machine browses and controls the NAS.
• Song requests from Telegram: send a link or “Artist - Title”, get the proper recording filed and a yearly Requests playlist on Plex; it asks only when it is not sure.
• Other libraries respected: point it at Lidarr’s folder and a recording that exists there is never downloaded again; playlists use the better copy, and own duplicates can be swapped out.
• Daemon or one-shot, same CLI. td daemon runs on an interval and listens on a Unix socket; every other td command talks to it if it’s running and does the work itself if not.
• --json everywhere. One JSON object per line, for scripts and agents.
• Secrets stay out of the config with token_file, and SQLite is the single source of truth.
• Nix first-class: flake, binary cache, Home Manager module with a systemd user service.

Built with

Rust · clap · rusqlite · lofty · reqwest · tokio · yt-dlp · MusicBrainz · ListenBrainz

Where to go next: Installation, then Quick start. The reference has every configuration key and every command. The code is at github.com/arunoruto/tapedeck.