Extracting metadata from audio resources

[jsilland]

I would like to extend Hugo's resource handling to add first-class support for audio files (mp3 / aac / flac), including the ability to extract text metadata (artist / album / etc…) as well as cover art. Hugo currently special-cases image resources and provides APIs to operate on the content of an image and to extract EXIF data; I would like to add an equivalent resource type to similarly allow extracting metadata from audio files.

My primary use case is to embed audio content on my website without having to duplicate the files' existing metadata in the declaration of a page resource — this would greatly reduce the toil associated with publishing new audio content over time. I don't foresee a need to manipulate or access the audio content itself, just the metadata which is accessible as part of those file formats.

I am happy to put work into making this happen — I am comfortable writing Go and there are existing native libraries to perform the tag parsing, e.g. https://github.com/dhowden/tag. I have seen the recent addition to the contribution guide mentioning not wanting to accept patches for additional features; I'd be happy to trade one or few bugfixes in order to land this one. Either way, please let me know if this seems like a reasonable addition to Hugo, either now or in the future.

[jsilland]

FYI I now have a working prototype of this at 9513ea2 — it's very early but it seems to work okay, and includes support for turning cover art into proper Hugo image resources. The following template gets rendered as expected:

<ul>
  {{ $audioResources := $.Page.Resources.ByType "audio" }} 
  {{ range $index, $audioFile := $audioResources }}
    <li>
      {{ with $audioFile.AudioTags }}
        <a href="{{ $audioFile.RelPermalink }}">
          {{ .Artist }}
          {{ with .Art }}
            <img src="{{ .RelPermalink }}" />
          {{ end }}
        </a>
      {{ end }}
    </li>
  {{ end }}
</ul>

My next step is to clean up the code and write tests — this is not ready for review at this time but I wanted to share the progress

[rthinkel]

This is awesome, has there been any further progress with it? I'd love to be able to implement this feature on my site. Thank you for your work!

[github-actions]

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