Programming As A Hobby -- Let's Make Coding Like Knitting

CodingVibe — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 02:53:55 +0000

Recently, I've been having tons of fun programming on stream and realized it was because the pressure was low and the goal was simple and relevant. I decided to distill those feelings in to a relatively short talk showing off projects, tossing out potential ideas, and trying to open the minds of a non-technical audience to the the world of software without self-imposed barriers or self conscious feelings of ineptitude. I showed off such ridiculous things as an offline LoFi Girl-inspired music visualization site, a Twitter bot for tweeting Cheesecake Factory menu changes, and a tool to send Instagram photos to my relatives who refuse to use Instagram.

This talk's also available on YouTube here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S82LorEHeNg

Talk given March 18th, 2022 for OJO Labs as part of a Beer Friday talk series.

This Script is Only Useful to Me (Probably)

CodingVibe — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 02:26:34 +0000

I have a podcast with a friend and we were interested in uploading our episodes in full to YouTube. Unfortunately, he doesn't know how to video edit and I'm busy with my job, streaming, the podcast, and writing articles like this, so it seemed like YouTube as a podcast platform was dead to us. I did a bit of research and it turns out both our podcast platform Buzzsprout and YouTube have APIs available for uploading, which meant if I invested the time, I could bundle up the uploading work in to one script and have it done even faster.

Then the classic dilemma hit me -- do I really want to sink the time in to doing this? There's so many factors that go in to that like how much time it'll save me, how much time it'll take, will anyone else find it useful. Ultimately, I hit upon the piece of logic I often hit on when deciding what personal projects to do -- it sounds fun so why not?

Three Scripts

First off, I decided to write three separate scripts to do the following operations:

Upload the podcast to Buzzsprout
Create a visualization video for the podcast. Essentially a static image with audio visualization on top with the podcast as the audio
Upload a video to YouTube

All three on their own are small, atomic operations that can be stitched together with an overarching script or CI/CD platform to form a complete workflow, but can also be used individually. Since the upload data required for both Buzzsprout and YouTube are similar (time to publish, title, description, and episode number), it makes sense to streamline the input of data in to both upload scripts and call the script just once.

Podcast Workflow Automator

Copying and pasting the code from all three scripts and making one super script does future me a disservice. By smashing them together, but also having them separate, any changes in one code base needs to also be copy/pasted in to the other code base and if I don't remember that, I'll end up fixing bugs or coding enhancements twice. As mentioned earlier, I could have one base script and call these individual scripts on their own via Bash, Powershell, or a CI/CD platform, but since Python also allows you to import code from other .py files, I decided to keep it consistent and go for that option.

Prepping individual scripts for import

Unfortunately, the way in which I usually write standalone scripts isn't compatible with import, so a few changes had to be made. Upon initially writing the scripts, my code looked like this:

def main():
  parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
  parser.add_argument("--foo")

  # script logic

if __name__ == "__main__":
  try:
    main()

This structure doesn't allow us to use the meat and potatoes of the script without grabbing arguments from argparse. To fix this, we pull all the argparse logic in to its own function, then call the main function from that. The main function is also renamed to something more logical so when we're importing it in other functions, we're not scratching our heads wondering what main does.

def call_with_args():
  parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
  parser.add_argument("--foo")

  args, _ = parser.parse_known_args()
  upload_podcast(args.foo)

def upload_podcast(foo):
  # upload logic


if __name__ == "__main__":
  try:
    call_with_args()

Now that our relevant functions have been renamed, we can move on to exposing and importing them in to our new script. First off, the base script needed to be moved to a directory with the name I wanted to use for the package. Next an __init__.py file had to be created alongside the script that imported and exposed the primary function as part of being a module. Then a setup.py file detailing the package and its dependencies had to be created in the base directory. All of that is to enable importing in the requirements.txt like this:

git+https://github.com/codingvibe/audio-to-vizualization@main#egg=audio_to_visualization
git+https://github.com/codingvibe/buzzsprout-uploader@main#egg=buzzsprout_uploader
git+https://github.com/codingvibe/youtube-uploader@main#egg=youtube_uploader

Now we can import the relevant functions in to our combined script like any normal package this:

from buzzsprout_uploader import upload_podcast
from audio_to_visualization import create_vizualization
from youtube_uploader import upload_video

Was this a non-trivial amount of work to do for something nobody is likely going to use? Yes. Are there easier, dirtier ways to do this? Absolutely. Since I have the repos locally, I could have just done this:

sys.path.append('../')

from buzzsprout_uploader.buzzsprout_uploader import upload_podcast
from audio_to_visualization.audio_to_visualization import create_vizualization
from youtube_uploader.youtube_uploader import upload_video

Had I done this, I wouldn't have had to bother with the script.py or package directory. I decided to go with the pip-importable way just to get some experience doing it and on the off chance anyone else would use this. Had I not intended to upload it to Github, I definitely would have done it the lazy way (and in fact I did on my Twitch stream and only made it importable when I wrote this article). Doing it the "right" way took quite a while and lead to this fun experience:

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1498493630411157507-456'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1498493630411157507&theme=dark" }

Final Thoughts

Is this a project more people can use than just me? Maybe, but honestly it doesn't matter -- it's going to make my life marginally easier and was fun to write. I spent probably 20 hours taking my time to upload an episode to Buzzsprout and YouTube from 20 minutes to 5, which means it'll be worth the time investment once we have 80+ episodes. As the saying goes, "why spend 10 minutes doing a task when I can spend 3 hours automating it?"

The three individual scripts you can find here:

codingvibe / audio-to-vizualization

Given an audio file and background image, make an audio visualization on the image to the audio

Audio to Visualization

The purpose of this small Python script is to transform an audio file in to a video using a background image and an audio visualizer. This tool was written leveraging ffmpeg and requires it be installed and accessible via the ffmpeg command on the command line.

FFMPEG

Download ffmpeg and get access to the documentation at https://www.ffmpeg.org/

Requirements

Install via pip:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Run the script

python audio_to_visualization/audio_to_visualization.py <arguments>

Command line arguments

Argument	Description	Required	Default
--audio	path to audio file to visualize	true	N/A
--background	path to image to use for background	true	N/A
--output	path and name of output file. Must end in .mp4	true	N/a
--vis-background-to-vid-ratio	ratio of visualization background height to input image height (0.0-1.0)	false	0.2
--vis-waves-to-vid-ratio	ratio of visualization waves height to input image height (0.0-1.0)	false	0.15
--vis-color	color for visualization waveforms. can be used multiple times	false

…

View on GitHub

codingvibe / buzzsprout-uploader

Simple script to upload a podcast to Buzzsprout

buzzsprout-uploader

Simple script to upload a podcast to Buzzsprout.

Requirements

Install via pip:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Run the script

python buzzsprout_uploader/buzzsprout_uploader.py <arguments>

API Key and Podcast ID

A Buzzsprout API key and the ID of your podcast are both required to run this script. You can obtain both by logging in to Buzzsprout and navigating to https://www.buzzsprout.com/my/profile/api

Command line arguments

Argument	Description	Required	Default
--audio	path to audio file to upload	true	N/A
--title	title of the podcast	true	N/A
--description	description of the podcast	true	N/A
--tags	space separated list of tags for the podcast	false	[]
--publish-at-date	date to publish video (format is YYYY-MM-DD)	false
--publish-at-time	time to publish video (iso format)	false
--episode-number	episode number of this upload	false	If not supplied, most recent episode number + 1
--season-number	season number for this upload	false	If not supplied, most recent episode number
--private	whether or not

…

View on GitHub

codingvibe / youtube-uploader

Updated version of the Python YouTube upload example from Google with extra command line arguments

youtube-uploader

Updated version of the Python YouTube upload example from Google with extra command line arguments.

Install Requirements

pip install

Run the script

python youtube_uploader.py <arguments>

Command line arguments

Argument	Description	Required	Default
--file	path to video file to upload	true	N/A
--title	title of the uploaded video	false	Test Title
--description	description of the video	false	Test Description
--category	YouTube category of video (https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/videoCategories/list)	false	22
--keywords	comma separated list of tags	false
--privacy-status	privacy status of video	false	public
--publish-at-date	date to publish video (format is YYYY-MM-DD)	false
--publish-at-time	time to publish video (iso format)	false
--client-secrets-file	path to client secrets json file	false	`youtube-uploader-client-credentials.json`

View on GitHub

And the final workflow script is here:

codingvibe / podcast-workflow-automator

A script that uploads a podcast to Buzzsprout, creates an audio visualization of your podcast, then uploads to YouTube

podcast-workflow-automator

A script that uploads a podcast to Buzzsprout, creates an audio visualization of your podcast, then uploads to YouTube

Command line arguments

I know there are a lot. I'm sorry.

Argument	Description	Required	Default
--audio	path to audio file to upload	true	N/A
--title	title of the uploaded podcast and video	true	N/A
--description	description of the podcast and video	true	N/A
--api-key	Buzzsprout API key to use to upload	true	N/A
--podcast-id	ID of the podcast to upload to	true	false
--background-image	path to image to use for background in video	true	N/A
--tags	space separated list of tags for the podcast and video	false
--episode-number	episode number of this upload	false	If not supplied, most recent episode number + 1
--season-number	season number for this upload	false	If not supplied, most recent episode number
--private	whether or not this upload should be private	false	false
--publish-at-date	date

…

View on GitHub

DEV Community: CodingVibe

Programming As A Hobby -- Let's Make Coding Like Knitting

This Script is Only Useful to Me (Probably)

Three Scripts

Podcast Workflow Automator

Prepping individual scripts for import

Final Thoughts

codingvibe / audio-to-vizualization

Given an audio file and background image, make an audio visualization on the image to the audio

Audio to Visualization

FFMPEG

Requirements

Run the script

Command line arguments

codingvibe / buzzsprout-uploader

Simple script to upload a podcast to Buzzsprout

buzzsprout-uploader

Requirements

Run the script

API Key and Podcast ID

Command line arguments

codingvibe / youtube-uploader

Updated version of the Python YouTube upload example from Google with extra command line arguments

youtube-uploader

Install Requirements

Run the script

Command line arguments

codingvibe / podcast-workflow-automator

A script that uploads a podcast to Buzzsprout, creates an audio visualization of your podcast, then uploads to YouTube

podcast-workflow-automator

Command line arguments