Cotton is a music downloader for people who know what they want. It allows you to fetch individual albums/singles or entire discographies with a single command and store them in a sane directory structure, so chaos does not reign over your library.
Cotton can be installed via pip. To do this, open the terminal and run the
following commands:
git clone https://github.com/marty-thane/cotton
cd cotton/
pip install .
Note: Cotton depends on ffmpeg for file format conversion. Ensure it is installed prior to running.
Reading the help documentation is the first step in understanding any program:
usage: frontend.py [-h] [--codec CODEC] [--path PATH] [--yes] {artist,release} keyword [keyword ...]
positional arguments:
{artist,release} select the scope in which to search
keyword one or more keywords to search for
options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--codec CODEC specify the file format to use (default: mp3)
--path PATH specify where to store files (default: ~/Music)
--yes do not prompt the user for confirmation
A basic usage example might look like this:
cotton release bold as love hendrix
If you already have a list of artists stored in a file, you can do the following in your terminal:
while read artist; do
cotton --yes artist $artist
done < artist_list.txt
Cotton relies on ytmusicapi for searching and yt_dlp for downloading music.
Internally, it is split into two submodules: frontend and backend.