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Export Playlist / Backup

I didn't want to put this in the New Idea section, as I am not really suggesting a new idea.

 

I started deleting a lot of the mp3s off of my computer in favor of just listening to the same songs over Spotify.  I needed the extra hard drive space because I still have a Windows XP computer.

 

I have no use for listening to music offline as I only have a desktop computer and can't currently even burn CDs with this lousy PC.  I can't afford Spotify Premium anyway and have no devices to listen to it on.

 

I wanted to know if there was any way to make a backup of the Spotify playlists.  I was thinking of a simple playlist file that could be exported to your computer as backup.  I have noticed a lot topics on here having to do with playlists accidentally being deleted or disappearing and it has made me nervous.  I don't want that to happen to me now that I have begun migrating to Spotify and away from mp3s.

 

 

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92 Replies

Hi there,

 

I'm a bit careful with loggin in to this kind of stuff. I came here to back-up my playlists not to lose them all because i made a mistake by logging into this website :P. Question to community: Is it safe to log-in here and does it work?

 

Thanks in advance!

Thanks Rollo, I've been looking for that functionality for a looong time!
I have about 500 songs, some of them rather obscure and I fear I could not remember all the artist names or song titles if I lost the playlist.
Control A on the desktop app, drag it right over to Excel 2013, worked the first time.

We loved Joels Script. And we extended it, because we needed to not just export, but migrate all Playlists and MyMusic from one account to another.

 

At http://www.spotmybackup.com/ (all Javascript, the servers knows nothing about you) you can backup your playlists and My Music in one file. If you ever want to migrate those playlists to another account, go there again and import the Backup File. It will generate all playlists and My Music, even in the right order.If you interupt the process, just start again. It will be resumed.

 

Please note: Starred playlists are not supported by the WebAPI. Your starred playlist will be named "importedStarred". But you can drag & drop to the starred playlist in the Fatclient.


Of course the source is available at Github. Hope you enjoy it.

Dear SpotMyBackup

 

Tks for this up. I am using the app right now and so far... (10 minutes  still like this http://i.imgur.com/PW2WspD.png)... How long it takes normally? Thank you again

 

 


SpotMyBackup schrieb:

At http://www.spotmybackup.com/ (all Javascript, the servers knows nothing about you) you can backup your playlists and My Music in one file.


Seems it cannot login to my Spotify account (Facebook login). I'm on IE11, Windows 7 64bit at the moment. I can see the Spotify popup asking for permission, but after confirming it, that window stays empty.

 

By the way, if you also want to convert your playlists to another streaming site, Soundiiz is a good online tool for that.


@Matol788 wrote:

Hm, this doesn't seem to work on playlist folders? Any chance you can share your code so that I can make an improved personal version?


SpotMyBackup extended Joel's script so as to provide a single .JSON file containing all playlists (unfortunately still w/o Folder data):  http://www.spotmybackup.com/

They put the source code on GitHub: https://github.com/secuvera/SpotMyBackup/

As did Joel: https://github.com/jal278/spotify-playlist-export

Joel's tool provides .CSV export per playlist: http://joellehman.com/playlist/

(Btw, both have the link to GitHub in the top left corner of their tool pages.)

 

At the occasion, a huge shoutout to Joel and SpotMyBackup: THANK YOU, YOU'RE AWESOME!!! 😄


@fassbrause wrote:

Hi, I found this webapp. 

http://netz.kiwi/spotify/backup

 

Sometimes slow but you can backup all of your spotify playlists.


Unfortunately, that server is down.  (I was also not able to find an alternative way of access to that app by a quick googling.)

Marked as solution

https://github.com/bitsofpancake/spotify-backup is yet another Spotify playlists backup tool.

It provides a Python script file to download and run locally.  Like http://www.spotmybackup.com/, it creates a .JSON dump of all the playlists; both spotify-backup.py and SpotMyBackup without folder data, unfortunately;  and at least spotify-backup.py also without collaborative playlists (don't know for SpotMyBackup).

 

(I stumbled over spotify-backup.py while googling.  I haven't tried it.)

 

Note that principally downloading and running a script (or other executable program) outside the browser poses a much bigger security risk (depending on your trust in the source) than applications that run within the browser.  But since spotify-backup.py is just 160 lines of open source code, it seems very unlikely that it would contain malicious code, b/c everyone can check it and report it to the GitHub administration.

 

In conclusion, I recommend http://www.spotmybackup.com/ for backing up all playlists in a file, mostly because it's less effort than spotify-backup.py.


@nicolascorizzo wrote:

Dear @SpotMyBackup

 

Tks for this up. I am using the app right now and so far... (10 minutes  still like this http://i.imgur.com/PW2WspD.png)... How long it takes normally? Thank you again

 

 


 

The time it takes depends on the number of playlists and tracks. As long the counter goes up, everything is fine. In my personal playlists and My Music I keep around 4000 Tracks. It takes about 8 minutes for the backup and more than 20 minutes to re-import.


@hans-jürgen wrote:

Seems it cannot login to my Spotify account (Facebook login). I'm on IE11, Windows 7 64bit at the moment..


You're right. IE has a Bug/Feature (you name it) since IE 8 not allowing cross-domain JavaScript communication between browser tabs/windows. So please use Chrome or Firefox.

 

SpotMyBackup now shows a corresponding message if being access by IE. Sorry.


@favorite wrote:

(unfortunately still w/o Folder data): 

Can you please specify what you mean with "Folder Data"? Thanks in advance.


SpotMyBackup schrieb:

@hans-jürgen wrote:

Seems it cannot login to my Spotify account (Facebook login). I'm on IE11, Windows 7 64bit at the moment..


You're right. IE has a Bug/Feature (you name it) since IE 8 not allowing cross-domain JavaScript communication between browser tabs/windows. So please use Chrome or Firefox.

 

SpotMyBackup now shows a corresponding message if being access by IE. Sorry.


Thanks for confirming and the explanation, usually I'm on Firefox anyhow, just sometimes testing things in IE. With that browser it works now.

(gah, can't find a way to delete posts)

Perhaps you do not realise that most (all?) songs available to stream on Spotify actually exist out there in the world in other formats and via other services? They're not custom-written/recorded just for Spotify lol


@SpotMyBackup wrote:

@favorite wrote:

(unfortunately still w/o Folder data): 

Can you please specify what you mean with "Folder Data"? Thanks in advance.


By "Folder data" I was thinking of the names and contents of Playlist Folders (not to be confused with Playlists).  Playlist Folders can contain Playlists and further Playlist Folders.

 

They enable users to organize large Playlist collections hierarchically.  Playlist Folders can be collapsed.  Prior to the recent Spotify application overhaul, they also provided a merged view of the contained Playlists.  (I hope this feature will be brought back soon!)

 

I did a text search in the .json backup file for a Folder name of mine and didn't find it, so I assume they are not saved yet by SpotMyBackup.  A restored backup would consequently be 'flattened'.

 

PS:  Sorry for the late reply!  I hadn't noticed your message.

PPS:  Thanks a bundle for the great tool! 🙂


@Tomalak wrote:

Perhaps you do not realise that most (all?) songs available to stream on Spotify actually exist out there in the world in other formats and via other services? They're not custom-written/recorded just for Spotify lol


If I interpret your message correctly, you are under the impression that this thread is about backing up the songs' audio data.  Instead, this is about backing up Playlist data - the names of Playlists and the songs they contain (roughly speaking).  This 'bookmarks' collection of sorts can grow quite large and valuable.

No, I understand the thread just fine. I was replying to a
comment on page 2 that questioned why anyone would bother
backing up a playlist whatsoever. It was /that/ poster who
seemed confused, as if a list of titles and songs from
Spotify would not be useful anywhere else ever.
Unfortunately I find myself unable to properly quote
previous messages in a reply and then I gave up trying.

Hello,

So, how should this be done when the Web API doesn't support it? I've found
that the only option is to build your own application using libspotify
(which, for some reason, is no longer supported!). As I'm on Windows using
C# I found that ohLibSpotify was the best solution.

The libspotify api is not for the weak at heart; it's really hard do work
with. Fortunately there is an example app included which you can play with.
I just added some code to that to extract all playlists and dumped contents
to text files. Not really anything fancy, but now at least I got away to
get my playlists backup up.

I don't understand why Spotify doesn't add support for playlist folders via
the Web API, things would be much simpler then...

Hi, valid point. The data used in the export is a minimal snapshot of the total data. We use the unique identifiers from spotify. Inside the code the data is strippped from the other stuff to keep the file size acceptable small, even on large data sets. But you can use those identifiers to get the real titles, album names, etc. if you like. That would be another use case or feature.
Marked as solution

I've 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).

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