Virtual Turntable

Since discovering the commandline music library organisation tool beets, I have organised my digital library using it. Amongst its convenient searching & metadata tools, it provides a plugin to fetch album art automatically which I use extensively; however I rarely view this artwork as I am commonly working whilst listening via ncmpcpp (without album art support).

At the beginning of the lockdown period caused by the COVID-19 epidemic, I decided to extend the beets library manager with a plugin to tweet the the album artwork of a given query. In order to do this, I extended beets' artwork management code to allow resizing to fit into a filesize (such as Twitter's 5MB limit). I use my plugin to run a Twitter account as a listening diary, and have written an extra script to allow me to share shows I'm listening to from NTS radio, Soundcloud, and others.

(If the Twitter feed isn't visible on this page it's likely your browser is blocking cross-site requests, Firefox does this by default.)