How do you transfer from Spotify to YouTube Music for free?
Well, very simple, use the “spotify_to_ytmusic” tool by Sean Reifschneider; many thanks Sean!
Preface
What is Spotify_to_ytmusic?, well to put it simply it’s a tool for moving from Spotify to YT
Getting Started
Install Python (you may already have it)
You will need a somewhat recent version of Python 3.10 and above are known to work, 3.8-3.10 might work.
For Windows
Download Python for Windows from: https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/
You can also use choco to install it: choco install python
For MacOS
Run:
1brew install python
2brew install python-tk
For Linux
You probably already have it installed. See your package manager of choice to install it.
Install spotify2ytmusic (via pip)
This package is available on pip, so you can install it using:
pip install spotify2ytmusic
or:
python3 -m pip install spotify2ytmusic
(Or) Running From Source
(Not recommended) (This is what I did -Darren)
Another option, instead of pip, is to just clone this repo and run directly from the source. However, you will need the “ytmusicapi” package installed, so you’ll probably want to use pip to install that at the very least.
To run directly from source:
1git clone git@github.com:linsomniac/spotify_to_ytmusic.git
2cd spotify_to_ytmusic
3pip install ytmusicapi
4pip install tk # If using the GUI
Then you can prefix the command you want to run with python3 -m spotify2ytmusic, for
example:
1python3 -m spotify2ytmusic gui
2python3 -m spotify2ytmusic list_playlists
3python3 -m spotify2ytmusic load_liked
4[etc...]
Graphical UI
If you have installed via PIP, you should be able to run: s2yt_gui
Otherwise, if running from source:
On Windows: python -m spotify2ytmusic gui
Or on Linux: python2 -m spotify2ytmusic gui
Login to YTMusic - Tab 0
Click the login button on the first tab
OR
Enter ytmusicapi oauth in a console.
This will give you a URL, visit that URL and authorize the application. When you are done with the import you can remove the authorization for this app.
This will write a file “oauth.json”. Keep this file secret while the app is authorized. This file includes a logged in session token.
ytmusicapi is a dependency of this software and should be installed as part of the “pip install”.
Backup Your Spotify Playlists - Tab 1
Click the Backup button, and wait until it finished and switched to the next tab.
OR do all the steps below
Download spotify-backup.
Run spotify-backup.py and it will help you authorize access to your spotify account.
Run: python3 spotify-backup.py playlists.json --dump=liked,playlists --format=json
This will save your playlists and liked songs into the file “playlists.json”.
Reverse your playlists - Tab 2
As mentionned below, the original program adds the songs in the ‘wrong’ order. That’s a feature I don’t like, so I created a script to reverse them. It seems to be reliable, but if you find anything weird, please open an issue. It creates a backup of the original file just in case anyway.
Import Your Liked Songs - Tab 3
Click the import button, and wait until it finished and switched to the next tab.
It will go through your Spotify liked songs, and like them on YTMusic. It will display the song from spotify and then the song that it found on YTMusic that it is liking. I’ve spot-checked my songs and it seems to be doing a good job of matching YTMusic songs with Spotify. So far I haven’t seen a single failure across a couple hundread songs, but more esoteric titles it may have issues with.
List Your Playlists - Tab 4
Click the list button, and wait until it finished and switched to the next tab.
This will list the playlists you have on both Spotify and YTMusic, so you can individually copy them.
Copy Your Playlists - Tab 5
You can either copy all playlists, or do a more surgical copy of individual playlists. Copying all playlists will use the name of the Spotify playlist as the destination playlist name on YTMusic.
To copy all the playlists click the copy button, and wait until it finished and switched to the next tab.
NOTE: This does not copy the Liked playlist (see above to do that).
Copy specific Playlist - Tab 6
In the list output, find the “playlist id” (the first column) of the Spotify playlist and of the YTMusic playlist.
Then fill both input fields and click the copy button.
The copy playlist will take the name of the YTMusic playlist and will create the playlist if it does not exist, if you start the YTMusic playlist with a “+”:
Re-running “copy_playlist” or “load_liked” in the event that it fails should be safe, it will not duplicate entries on the playlist.
Command Line Usage
Login to YTMusic
ytmusicapi oauth
This will give you a URL, visit that URL and authorize the application. When you are done with the import you can remove the authorization for this app.
This will write a file “oauth.json”. Keep this file secret while the app is authorized. This file includes a logged in session token.
ytmusicapi is a dependency of this software and should be installed as part of the “pip install”.
Backup Your Spotify Playlists
Download spotify-backup.
Run spotify-backup.py and it will help you authorize access to your spotify account.
Run: python3 spotify-backup.py playlists.json --dump=liked,playlists --format=json
This will save your playlists and liked songs into the file “playlists.json”.
Import Your Liked Songs
Run: s2yt_load_liked
It will go through your Spotify liked songs, and like them on YTMusic. It will display the song from spotify and then the song that it found on YTMusic that it is liking. I’ve spot-checked my songs and it seems to be doing a good job of matching YTMusic songs with Spotify. So far I haven’t seen a single failure across a couple thousand songs, but more esoteric titles it may have issues with.
Import Your Liked Albums
Run: s2yt_load_liked_albums
Spotify stores liked albums outside of the “Liked Songs” playlist. This is the command to load your liked albums into YTMusic liked songs.
List Your Playlists
Run s2yt_list_playlists
This will list the playlists you have on both Spotify and YTMusic. You will need to individually copy them.
Copy Your Playlists
You can either copy all playlists, or do a more surgical copy of individual playlists. Copying all playlists will use the name of the Spotify playlist as the destination playlist name on YTMusic. To copy all playlists, run:
s2yt_copy_all_playlists
NOTE: This does not copy the Liked playlist (see above to do that).
In the list output above, find the “playlist id” (the first column) of the Spotify playlist, and of the YTMusic playlist, and then run:
s2yt_copy_playlist <SPOTIFY_PLAYLIST_ID> <YTMUSIC_PLAYLIST_ID>
If you need to create a playlist, you can run:
s2yt_create_playlist "<PLAYLIST_NAME>"
Or the copy playlist can take the name of the YTMusic playlist and will create the playlist if it does not exist, if you start the YTMusic playlist with a “+”:
s2yt_copy_playlist <SPOTIFY_PLAYLIST_ID> +<YTMUSIC_PLAYLIST_NAME>
For example:
s2yt_copy_playlist SPOTIFY_PLAYLIST_ID "+Feeling Like a PUNK"
Re-running “copy_playlist” or “load_liked” in the event that it fails should be safe, it will not duplicate entries on the playlist.
Searching for YTMusic Tracks
This is mostly for debugging, but there is a command to search for tracks in YTMusic:
s2yt_search --artist <ARTIST> --album <ALBUM> <TRACK_NAME>
Details About Search Algorithms
The function first searches for albums by the given artist name on YTMusic.
It then iterates over the first three album results and tries to find a track with the exact same name as the given track name. If it finds a match, it returns the track information.
If the function can’t find the track in the albums, it then searches for songs by the given track name and artist name.
Depending on the yt_search_algo parameter, it performs one of the following actions:
If yt_search_algo is 0, it simply returns the first song result.
If yt_search_algo is 1, it iterates over the song results and returns the first song that matches the track name, artist name, and album name exactly. If it can’t find a match, it raises a ValueError.
If yt_search_algo is 2, it performs a fuzzy match. It removes everything in brackets in the song title and checks for a match with the track name, artist name, and album name. If it can’t find a match, it then searches for videos with the track name and artist name. If it still can’t find a match, it raises a ValueError.
If the function can’t find the track using any of the above methods, it raises a ValueError.
FAQ
How does the lookup algorithm work?
Given the Spotify track information, it does a lookup for the album by the same artist on YTMusic, then looks at the first 3 hits looking for a track with exactly the same name. In the event that it can’t find that exact track, it then does a search of songs for the track name by the same artist and simply returns the first hit.
The idea is that finding the album and artist and then looking for the exact track match will be more likely to be accurate than searching for the song and artist and relying on the YTMusic algorithm to figure things out, especially for short tracks that might be have many contradictory hits like “Survival by Yes”.
My copy is failing with repeated “ERROR: (Retrying) Server returned HTTP 400: Bad Request”.
Try running with “–track-sleep=3” argument to do a 3 second sleep between tracks. This will take much longer, but may succeed where faster rates have failed.
License
Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal
spotify-backup.py licensed under MIT License. See https://github.com/caseychu/spotify-backup for more information.