GUIDE: Ripping and tagging SoundCloud songs

Ripping songs off SoundCloud to listen to/play around with in DJ software has always been a pain in the ass for me since yt-dlp isn’t able to tag the files properly and doesn’t download the highest quality files possible if artist enables download. Hence I tried figuring out the easiest way to download and tag the songs mostly automatically. This post is the tutorial for exactly this.

Always support the artists. If songs are available elsewhere – buy them, don’t rip them. This tutorial is dedicated to situations where artist enables free download/songs aren’t available elsewhere for purchase.

You’ll need

JDownloader 2 – for downloading from Soundcloud
ID3 renamer – for tagging
Mp3tag – for adding covers to the music files

Downloading

We are going to use JDownloader 2 to download as it supports setting up custom naming schemes which we can then use to automatically tag the songs.

Settings

After opening the app click Settings tab in the top toolbar, then click Settings. Then go into Plugins and search for plugin soundcloud.com.

Grab 500×500 thumbnail (.jpg)? – check this box, if you want higher definition covers you can also check Grab 500×500 thumbnail (.jpg)? but for my use case, 500×500 is more than enough.
Audio quality selection mode – Best quality
Customize the filename! – *channelname* - *songtitle**ext*

The rest you can configure as you see fit.

LinkGrabber

JDownloader 2 automatically grabs every link that you copy into your clipboard however at times if you’re copying many of them one after another it can skip a few of them. Be sure to check it.

Here I’ve added everything I have to download. For every link, it’ll grab 2 downloads – a cover and a music file. Now highlight everything, right-click and press Start Downloads.

Adding covers

Now that everything has been downloaded you can add covers to music files using mp3tag.

Open the software and using change the directory to whatever folder your JD2 downloads go into.

Now highlight all of the songs and press , then from the dropdown menu choose Import cover from file.

Set everything up as shown on the screenshot. The string for the image filename is %_filename%_t500x500.png. Then click OK. After a few seconds, covers will automatically be added to music files. Some errors will pop up but that’s normal. Just close them. After that repeat those steps but use %_filename%_t500x500.jpg string now.

Reader

Some songs still don’t have covers attached to them. Why is that?

Kyuko

If the artist has enabled free DL from Soundcloud, unfortunately, JDownloader doesn’t rename those downloads. If the artist didn’t name them the same as on the site, they can’t be matched automatically.

Tagging

Open ID3 renamer and change the working directory by clicking on the default path on the left side of the window.

Then click Tag from filename… .

Configure everything as seen on the screenshot. RegEx formula is (.*) - (.*). Then click Continue. You’ll have to click OK for every song ID3 renamer wants to save tags to. You can use Enter to make it faster.

Same as in the previous section, if the artist enabled free download songs might be tagged incorrectly / not tagged at all. You can fix this manually using previously downloaded mp3tag.

Conclusion

Now most of your songs should be tagged and have a cover attached to them. This method is not perfect, however, it’s enough for me. If you have any ideas on how to improve it feel free to leave a comment below!