ljrk0 / ascii-star

An Ultrastar song player for the command line written in rust

ascii-star

A command line player for Ultrastar songs. An example cc licensed song is provided in the repo.

Dependencies

The code currently uses the following system libraries not bundled within the Rust application:

• gstreamer
• gst-plugins

Usage

To play a local file specified by the song.txt metadata, run

$ cargo build
$ cargo run -- --local <ultrastar txt>

To use the remote song server, run

$ cargo run -- --search "<keywords>"

Content Providers

We extended the song.txt metadata file format to contain not only

#MP3:Songfile.mp3

but also URIs such as file:// and http:// or https://:

#MP3:file://Songfile.mp3
#MP3:https://youtube.com/...

Depending on the URL given, different content providers trigger. Perhaps this should later be changed to

#MP3:spotify://...
#MP3:youtube://

to not rely on heuristics for the content provider and use http[s] heuristics only as fallback.

In general, content providers implement the trait UrlContentProvider defined in src/content_providers.rs. Eg. the YouTube content provider src/content_providers/youtube.rs defines a struct YouTube with a constructor ::new(<youtube-url>) which returns such an object. The actual trait consists simply of a a function urls() that returns a vector of playable resource URLs.

YouTube Content Provider

Unfortunately this content provider is currently out of date as it uses a legacy API. The get_video_info API call doesn't immediately expose the video_id and length_seconds but encodes them in a JSON object called player_response which in turn contains

• a videoDetails object containing videoId and lengthSeconds with the same function as before
• a streamingData object containing arrays formats and adaptive_formats with streaming URLs embedded.

However, not all videos use this API, especially older or music videos seem to be hard to access. It's probably better to use the crate youtube-dl for the heavy lifting.

Remote Song Server

The project https://github.com/aticu/ascii-star-server/ implements a remote video lookup server which by default is queried under the SERVER_URL of http://localhost:8080. It can serve music files as well.