album2vid

If you run a YouTube channel for music like I do, you will find this useful. It lets you generate an output video from audio files and their respective cover art reasonably fast.

Installation

The simplest way to install this tool is to download the binary for your OS on the releases page.
You can also choose to just clone the python script and run it manually with your own binary of Ffmpeg. This should work on any OS.

Usage

album2vid [-h] [-f] [path]

Flags:
-f or --fast: Enables fast mode, may cause rendering errors.
Essentially, without this flag, the program converts your input files to AAC first, and then stitches those into the output video.

Args:
path: The full path to the album's folder
Make sure to enclose this in quotes

First make sure you have prepared your album's files correctly. They need to be ordered numerically and the cover art needs to have a particular name.

Audio file compatibility:

.wav .mp3 .m4a .ogg .flac

Here's an example folder:

As you can see, the tracks have their numbers in front of them, and the cover art is named "cover.jpg".
This program also accepts "cover.png".

After it converts your audio files and cover art to a video, a file named "out.mp4" will appear in the same directory you ran the command on. This is your final video, you are ready to upload!
In addition, this program also generates a tracklist with timestamps for you! It will output to the file "tracklist.txt" in that same directory.

Compiling

To compile this python script I use PyInstaller, which can be installed via pip like so: pip install pyinstaller.
Before you compile, make sure you grab the appropriate ffmpeg binary for the system you are targeting.
Once you have the ffmpeg binary and this script in the same folder, you can use the following PyInstaller command to compile it into one fat binary:

• For x86 systems: pyinstaller -F --add-binary="ffmpeg:." --target-arch=x86_64 album2vid.py.
• For arm64 systems: pyinstaller -F --add-binary="ffmpeg:." --target-arch=arm64 album2vid.py.

The resulting executable should be found in the dist/ directory.

Notes

• The output is rendered in x264 at 1080x1080.
• Your cover art must be 1:1 aspect ratio; most are.
• If a universal2 binary of ffmpeg exists for macOS, I would love to know as it would allow me to compile only one binary for macOS to support both architectures.

Known Issues

• Certain image files cause the GPU acceleration to fail and thus the whole command, I haven't looked too far into this
• The current binary build, for at least Windows, does not actual reference the correct internal ffmpeg frozen binary. This will be fixed soon

Big thanks to:

Z from Nightride FM for help with FFMPEG
Alexis Masson for helping refactor, organize, and simplify the codebase

Projects that use this:

album2vid-gui by HurleyBirdJr