Playlist Archiver

Build reliable offline media archives from playlists and channels. This skill covers incremental downloading, archive management, scheduling, metadata extraction, and organizing large media collections that stay up-to-date automatically.

Core Principles

1. Archival Is Not Just Downloading

An archive is a curated, organized, and verifiable collection. You need tracking (what was downloaded when), organization (consistent folder structure), and redundancy (backups of your archive).

2. Incremental Updates Are Essential

Re-downloading everything is wasteful and risks hitting rate limits. Use archive files to track what you already have and only fetch new content. This also makes resuming interrupted operations trivial.

3. Structure Before Scale

A good directory structure scales. Design your folder hierarchy before you have 10,000 files. Flat directories are unmanageable. Use metadata variables to organize logically.

4. Plan for Long-Term Maintenance

Archives are long-term commitments. Format choices today affect accessibility tomorrow. Favor open formats (MKV, FLAC, Opus) over proprietary ones. Document your archive structure.