I had thought this blog already had this post. Apparently, it doesn't. So, here it is.
Straight from my GitHub.
Geetify is an Android app that allows you to search for YouTube videos and download them as small audio files. I made it because there was no equivalent to Spotify or Gaana or Voot etc for Nepali songs. [Edit: Turns out, Spotify does have Nepali songs]
The downloaded audio files are a special kind, called DASH audio. DASH audio seems to be a 'streamable' audio type. YouTube using this type of audio makes sense. There's an .mp4 and a .webm format audio for (mostly) all videos on YouTube. Geetify prefers the .webm version since it seems to be more well-behaved for seeking to different times while playing and is in general smaller. Currently, there is no way to change that preference. Also, it automatically chooses the lowest bitrate audio because of the smaller size. While it may not be noticeable for most songs, sometimes, it is very conspicuous - one example is Castle of Glass by Linkin Park. There is no option to choose the desired bitrate either at this moment.
The heart of this project lies in the extraction of the audio links from YouTube videos and rendering those often 'signature-protected' links usable. This is why I looked around the internet for something like this and I found youtube-dl. I first made a Python program replicating the core functionality of youtube-dl and then simply ported it to Java for Android. Details and the inner workings of this process of extraction have been posted here as a separate post - Youtube audio downloader. Throughout the project, the aforementioned youtube-dl has been the go-to reference. Without it, this project would've been impossible.
Oh, almost forgot to mention - I originally created this back towards the beginning of 2018 if I remember correctly. I used a third party website to do the conversion for me. So it was very simple code back then compared to now. Then, all of a sudden, the third-party website stopped being easy going on the likes of me, who crafted HTML requests similar to the ones produced by real users on real web browsers, to get the songs programmatically. So, that was the whole reason for basically a replacement of the engine of the program, so to speak.
There are some bugs here and there but overall, the program is functional.
Here's the direct link to the apk.
Straight from my GitHub.
Geetify is an Android app that allows you to search for YouTube videos and download them as small audio files. I made it because there was no equivalent to Spotify or Gaana or Voot etc for Nepali songs. [Edit: Turns out, Spotify does have Nepali songs]
The downloaded audio files are a special kind, called DASH audio. DASH audio seems to be a 'streamable' audio type. YouTube using this type of audio makes sense. There's an .mp4 and a .webm format audio for (mostly) all videos on YouTube. Geetify prefers the .webm version since it seems to be more well-behaved for seeking to different times while playing and is in general smaller. Currently, there is no way to change that preference. Also, it automatically chooses the lowest bitrate audio because of the smaller size. While it may not be noticeable for most songs, sometimes, it is very conspicuous - one example is Castle of Glass by Linkin Park. There is no option to choose the desired bitrate either at this moment.
The heart of this project lies in the extraction of the audio links from YouTube videos and rendering those often 'signature-protected' links usable. This is why I looked around the internet for something like this and I found youtube-dl. I first made a Python program replicating the core functionality of youtube-dl and then simply ported it to Java for Android. Details and the inner workings of this process of extraction have been posted here as a separate post - Youtube audio downloader. Throughout the project, the aforementioned youtube-dl has been the go-to reference. Without it, this project would've been impossible.
Oh, almost forgot to mention - I originally created this back towards the beginning of 2018 if I remember correctly. I used a third party website to do the conversion for me. So it was very simple code back then compared to now. Then, all of a sudden, the third-party website stopped being easy going on the likes of me, who crafted HTML requests similar to the ones produced by real users on real web browsers, to get the songs programmatically. So, that was the whole reason for basically a replacement of the engine of the program, so to speak.
There are some bugs here and there but overall, the program is functional.
Here's the direct link to the apk.
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