This small project is my mp3 mixer. It was initially built to solve a very specific use case: I don't want to listen to multiple files from the same podcast. Instead, I wanted a way to mix together files from multiple sources and place them on my mp3 player. To make matters more complicated, certain podcasts only made sense to listen to in chronological order (e.g. lectures;) for others, only the latest episode was relevant (e.g. news;) for the vast majority, I wanted to listen to all episodes in random order. From these specifications, "FillMyPod" was born.
I chose to present this project not because it's particularly useful for back-end development, but rather because it shows the use of Python as a general purpose scripting language.
Of the four source files, only sources.py and outputs.py are particularly interesting (mp3.py defines a data structure and fillmypod.py simply connects sources to outputs). Presently, there are two sources, a "Chronological" source (which provides an iterator to files in a directory sorted by their modification time) and a "Random" source (which provides an iterator to the files in a random order.) Importantly, both only return iterators. In fact, one of the few design decisions was to deal with iterators (and generators, as we will see) rather than concrete collections. The benefit of this design is that I can add additional sources which are not file-system based. In theory, I could extend this system to pull its information directly from RSS feeds.
The second file, outputs.py has several additional classes which serve as transforms for the mp3 files. There are transforms which move the files, copy the files, rename the files as numbers (based on their order,) limit the total number of files, print the file paths, and combine multiple other transforms. Each of these transforms emits a new iterator with the modified mp3s. Again, additional transforms could easily be added by simply manipulating the stream of mp3s given.