Introduction

whatbetter is a script which automatically transcodes and uploads these files to What.CD.

The following command will scan through every FLAC you have ever downloaded (if it is in , determine which formats are needed, transcode the FLAC to each needed format, and upload each format to What.CD -- automatically.

$ whatbetter

Installation

You're going to need to install a few dependencies before using whatbetter.

First and foremost, you will need Python 2.7 or newer.

Once you've got Python installed, you will need a few modules: mechanize, mutagen, and requests. Try this:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

If you are on a seedbox, or a system without root priviliages, try this:

$ pip install --user -r requirements.txt

Alternatively, if you have setuptools installed, you can do this (in the source directory):

$ python setup.py install

This should theoretically install all required dependencies automatically.

Furthermore, you need several external programs: mktorrent, flac, lame, and sox. The method of installing these programs varies depending on your operating system, but if you're using something like Ubuntu you can do this:

# aptitude install mktorrent flac lame sox

If you are on a seedbox and you lack the privilages to install packages, you could contact your provider to have these packages installed.

At this point you may execute the following command:

$ whatbetter

And you will receive a notification stating that you should edit the configuration file ~/.whatbetter/config (if you're lucky).

Configuration

You've made it far! Congratulations. Open up the file ~/.whatbetter/config in a text editor. You're going to see something like this:

[whatcd]
username =
password = 
data_dir =
output_dir =
torrent_dir =
formats = flac, v0, 320, v2
media = sacd, soundboard, web, dvd, cd, dat, vinyl, blu-ray
24bit_behaviour = 0

username and password are your What.CD login credentials. data_dir is the directory where your downloads are stored. output_dir is the directory where your transcodes will be created. If the value is blank, data_dir will be used. torrent_dir is the directory where torrents should be created (e.g., your watch directory). formats is a list of formats that you'd like to support (so if you don't want to upload V2, just remove it from this list). media is a list of lossless media types you want to consider for transcoding. The default value is all What.CD lossless formats, but if you want to transcode only CD and vinyl media, for example, you would set this to 'cd, vinyl'. 24bit_behaviour defines what happens when the program encounters a FLAC that it thinks is 24bits. If it is set to '2', every FLAC that has a bits- per-sample property of 24 will be silently re-categorized. If it set to '1', a prompt will appear. The default is '0' which ignores these occurrences.

You should end up with something like this:

[whatcd]
username = RequestBunny
password = clapton
data_dir = /srv/downloads
output_dir =
torrent_dir = /srv/torrents
formats = flac, v0, 320
media = cd, vinyl, web
24bit_behaviour = 0

Alright! Now you're ready to use whatbetter.

Usage

usage: whatbetter [-h] [-s] [--config CONFIG] [--cache CACHE]
                  [release_urls [release_urls ...]]

positional arguments:
  release_urls     the URL where the release is located

optional arguments:
  -h, --help       show this help message and exit
  -s, --single     only add one format per release (useful for getting unique
                   groups)
  --config CONFIG  the location of the configuration file (default:
                   ~/.whatbetter/config)
  --cache CACHE    the location of the cache (default: ~/.whatbetter/cache)

Examples

To transcode and upload every snatch you've ever downloaded (this may take a while):

$ whatbetter

To transcode and upload a specific release (provided you have already downloaded the FLAC and it is located in your data_dir):

$ whatbetter http://what.cd/torrents.php?id=1000\&torrentid=1000000

Note that if you specify a particular release(s), whatbetter will ignore your configuration's media types and attempt to transcode the releases you have specified regardless of their media type (so long as they are lossless types).

Your first time running whatbetter might take a while, but after it has successfully gone through and checked everything, it'll go faster any consecutive runs due to it's caching method.