pancrythm

Pancrythm (a portmanteau of pancake + rhythm) is a simple, small, badly coded discord bot for playing music with your friends.

This came about because my group of friends used both of the above-named bots in the past to listen to music - usually sea shanties while playing Sea of Thieves - but these bots stopped working. Flew too close to the sun, I suppose.

Anyway, my instance of this bot is private, and is not intended to join more than 1 or 2 servers that I hang out with my friends in. In this way, I view it much like it would be if I were hanging out with friends, listening to music on the couch or in the car.

If you would like to also have a small music bot for your small discord server with your friends, you can run this one.

Installation and Setup

Works in linux. Requires ffmpeg. To set it up:

• Be on a linux box (or macos or unix or whatever) that has ffmpeg installed.
• Clone the git repo: git clone git@github.com:xiaodown/pancrythm.git
• Create a python virtual environment.
  • I use uv for this now: cd pancrythm; uv venv
  • You can do this with poetry or raw-dog with pip if you're a neanderthal, details left as an exercise for the reader.
• Install the required libraries: source .venv/bin/activate; uv pip install -r requirements.txt
• Create a discord bot:
  • This is covered elsewhere on the internet, but basically:
    • Go to the Discord Developer Portal and register a new application
    • Save your API key somewhere safe!
    • App settings -> Installation -> set Install Link to None
    • App settings -> Bot -> Set "Public Bot" OFF
    • App settings -> Bot -> Set all three intents ON
    • App settings -> OAuth2 -> Generate a url -> Select "bot" and:
      • Voice Permissions: Connect, Speak
      • Text Permissions: Send Messages, Embed Links, Read Message History
      • Integration Type: Guild Install
      • Copy the generated URL
• Have an admin (ideally you) invite the bot to your discord server
  • if necessary add it to a #music or whatever channel
• Edit settings:
  • in settings.py there are several things that you may wish to change.
    • Note that the bot's name is set via your discord developer app; the bot_name is just flavor text.
• Add your api key:
  • Create a text file called discordapikey.txt in the root of the checkout. It will be loaded from there.
    • Note: if you fork this repo, this file is in the .gitignore. Do be careful about not checking in your API key.

Running

• Run the bot:
  • source .venv/bin/activate; python ./discord_bot.py
• It is also trivial to set up a systemd service to run the bot if you would prefer - something like:
  • create a linux user for the bot (for safety) and check out everything in their homedir
  • create /etc/systemd/system/discordbot.service with contents similar to below
  • run with systemctl enable discordbot; systemctl start discordbot

[Unit]
Description=discord music bot for friends
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=always
RestartSec=1
User=pancrythm
WorkingDirectory=/home/pancrythm/pancrythm/
ExecStart=/home/pancrythm/pancrythm/.venv/bin/python /home/pancrythm/discord_bot.py >/dev/null 2>&1

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Use

You can set the wake word in settings.py but by default it is cake. So:

• !cake play <search term>
  • searches for <search term> and plays the first result
  • also accepts a YT url as the search term, which skips searching and plays directly
  • if a song is already playing, it will add the new one to the queue
• !cake stop
  • immediately stops playback and disconnects the bot from the voice channel
• !cake pause
  • pauses audio (note the bot will still idle timeout)
• !cake resume
  • resume playback
• !cake queue
  • shows songs currently in the queue
• !cake skip
  • skips the current song and goes to the next one in the queue
• !cake remove
  • removes song from the queue
• !cake help
  • displays currently supported commands and help text

TODO:

• Queueing system needs to be implemented - Done, if not particularly elegant. Should be race-condition safe(ish)
  • Skipping / manipulating items in the queueing system Done.
• Make the idle timeout less crazy (it's been rewritten like 6 times so there's bits everywhere)
  • Assuming the latest stab at finding duration works, this should be done.
• Create help text (!cake help or something) Done
• support URLs as a search term Done
• Clean up code / make more object oriented (unlikely)
  • This is really ugly; it started as a simple script and kept growing. Oh well. Refactoring is for chumps.

Risks:

If youtube changes the way their API works, we're at the mercy of yt_dlp. It may be possible to implement this without using yt_dlp, and I briefly looked into creating a google API key and using the Youtube Info V3 API, so there's a fallback plan, but...

Also if someone takes this and turns it into a huge commercial thing on hundreds of servers, rights-holders are going to be mad. That's not what this bot is for; it's for small use among groups of close friends. Don't be a jerk.