topic Re: A handy & useful way to backup your playlists in Desktop (Windows)

A handy & useful way to backup your playlists

Rollo_ — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 21:15:21 GMT

We've read all the posts about lost playlists, and its very frustrating when it happens. Here's a simple way to back them up.

Using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, just drag each playlist into a cell. You not only see the original playlist name [sortable in Excel], each cell has the link embedded so you can click on it to open the playlist.

Other programs like Wordpad will save the links, but not the title.

Re: A handy & useful way to backup your playlists

Peter__ — Sat, 28 Sep 2013 11:22:20 GMT

Handy information @Rollo_ !

Thanks for sharing!

Peter

Re: A handy & useful way to backup your playlists

Xacalet — Thu, 19 Dec 2013 23:09:42 GMT

Man, I adore you, a thousand thanks for sharing this trick!

Re: A handy & useful way to backup your playlists

jckinnick — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 09:04:13 GMT

That sounds like it will take forever. I have thousands of playlists.

Re: A handy & useful way to backup your playlists

jal278 — Tue, 17 Jun 2014 19:43:28 GMT

With spotify's new api it is possible to automate some of this, I threw together an app so you can download playlists in csv (which you can import into excel):

http://joellehman.com/playlist/

Re: A handy & useful way to backup your playlists

inkedwithstars — Tue, 01 Jul 2014 10:17:10 GMT

@jai278- This is a great feature- however, it only saves up to 100 songs 😕

Re: A handy & useful way to backup your playlists

jal278 — Tue, 01 Jul 2014 14:29:51 GMT

@inkedwithstars - thanks, glad you enjoy it! if you hit the 'more' button at the end of the list, it should load 100 more songs (and you can keep on hitting more until all the songs are loaded); also, after you load all the songs that way, the playlist download should include all of them as well.

At some point I plan on automating that (so it fetches all the songs all at once); and also perhaps a way for you to automatically download all of your playlists at once/

Re: A handy & useful way to backup your playlists

Joe — Tue, 01 Jul 2014 14:35:30 GMT

This sounds like a great idea @jal278 but I'd feel more comfortable if I could just paste a playlist URI rather than logging into spotify through a third party site 🙂

Re: A handy & useful way to backup your playlists

jal278 — Tue, 01 Jul 2014 14:46:50 GMT

I can understand the concern, @jwylot -- that would be better. But as far as I know in order to access playlists through the spotify API you have to log in. There may be an unofficial way to 'scrape' a playlist from just a URI, but it would be more fragile because the code might have to change every time spotify does an update on how they display playlists.

Re: A handy & useful way to backup your playlists

gschu — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 11:35:39 GMT

Thank you for the great app! We were able to back up ALL of our playlists which includes 100s of songs....

Re: A handy & useful way to backup your playlists

watsonbox — Fri, 22 May 2015 14:20:26 GMT

I've also written a simple tool to make this easier:

https://github.com/watsonbox/exportify

It uses the Spotify Web API to export playlists to CSV format and will not store any private data (or any data at all in fact).

Re: A handy & useful way to backup your playlists

Saintnick — Sat, 09 Jul 2016 21:54:27 GMT

So far, from need of backupping my years of playlist work, this is by far the most satisfying solution.

Suggestions for improvement:

Create one single CSV for all playlists with a Playlist column.
Create one single Excel .XSLX, or each playlist in its own tab
Allow to choose columns such as play length, spotify ID, etc.

Keep the good work going! Hope to hear form you soon at https://github.com/watsonbox/exportify

Re: A handy & useful way to backup your playlists

jckinnick — Sat, 09 Jul 2016 23:31:29 GMT

How many playlists do you have though, I have thousands upon thousands and Im wondering if this will work. Other methods I have tried always time out.

Re: A handy & useful way to backup your playlists

timothyjhorton — Mon, 26 Feb 2018 21:45:19 GMT

http://joellehman.com/playlist/ is much easier, you can easily change your password afterward if that's a concern.