Spotify, YT Music Playlist Importing

[İbrahim Yiğit]

Hi everyone, I wonder if it is possible to import Spotify playlist into PA.

I can get my Spotify playlist as TXT, CSV, JSON, XML file formats. Also I have the same musics on my phone's storage. Is it possible importing playlist into PA?

Thanks.

[MotleyG]

2 hours ago, İbrahim Yiğit said:

Hi everyone, I wonder if it is possible to import Spotify playlist into PA.

I can get my Spotify playlist as TXT, CSV, JSON, XML file formats. Also I have the same musics on my phone's storage. Is it possible importing playlist into PA?

Thanks.

Not if the music files are from Spotify. These are proprietary and will only play in Spotify.

If you mean you have the same songs in your personal, local phone library, then you should be able to do something. But you will need to edit the playlist files to make sure the paths point to the local files, not Spotify.

[andrewilley]

A local Playlist file (such as an M3U file) is simply a bunch of text lines which describe the precise folder details and filename of each audio file on your device's local storage. There is no information about the content of the file, just the exact filename.

If the exported data from Spotify (such as a CSV file) can be manipulated to create a match for your local filename structure, it could work. From a Google search, an example CSV export of three songs from Spotify might look like:

title;artist;album;isrc;addedDate;addedBy;duration;url
"Low Rider";War;"Why Can't We Be Friends";USRHD0610212;"2017-09-16 13:08";blackarcanis;191s;https://open.spotify.com/track/7Bz8yww6UMbTgTVLG6zbI4s
Roadgame;Kavinsky;OutRun;FRS711100690;"2017-09-16 13:08";blackarcanis;224s;https://open.spotify.com/track/7D1Dq1oEmlKNJltvzTL0wNs
Boom;"Snoop Dogg, T-Pain";Doggumentary;USCA21100279;"2017-09-16 13:08";blackarcanis;230s;https://open.spotify.com/track/31kOxwXPryPL2V4jAK50Dds

You could import that CSV file into a spreadsheet, and assuming your files are stored in a layout looking something like /Music/artistname/albumname/title.mp3, you could use simple string concatenation to build the necessary lines for making an M3U file, thus:

Music/War/Why Can't We Be Friends/Low Rider.mp3
Music/Kavinsky/OutRun/Roadgame.mp3
Music/Snoop Dogg, T-Pain/Doggumentary/Boom.mp3

You'd need to check for illegal characters such as ? or * and handle them manually. Technically for PA you only need the filename and final folder name, but other apps might need the full path.

So yes it could be done, but it would need a lot of things to line up perfectly.

Andre

[Rob DeMillo]

@andrewilleythanks for the hint. This method does work very well for exporting playlists from Plex.

I use the Plex Plugin WebTools-NG to export my playlists to a CSV file, where the entries look like:

/volume1/Media/Music/ArtistName/Albumname/Track.(format)

then I changed the Plex specific prefix "/volume1/Media" to a prefix for the location of my music on my SDCard on my phone, and wound up with entries that look like

/disk/Media/Music/ArtistName/AlbumName/Track.(format)

Put that into a music folder called "PlexPlaylists" and rescanned. They all showed up in Poweramp.

 

Edited July 6, 2022 by Rob DeMillo
mistyped.

[andrewilley]

@Rob DeMillo In fact, there's actually no need to edit the files at all, the exports from Plex should work fine as they are.

This is because PA tries to compensate for Playlist files imported from other file systems by ignoring all of the leading root path information and just checking for matches of the filename and the first level of folder name that it's contained within.

So in your example, /volume1/Media/Music/ArtistName/ would be ignored, and PA would check its library for an exact match for just the final Albumname/Track.(format)

Andre

[Rob DeMillo]

Bahhh! Seriously? That's excellent.

I didn't even try to just bring them over raw like that, I figured it wouldn't work so made the changes. Good to know for next time, thanks.

Worked beautifully, tho. 👍

[andrewilley]

PA's fuzzy matching was implemented to cope with exactly the circumstances you describe. If matches for the full absolute path were required, playlists would never work when copied between different platforms and devices.

Very occasionally there might be some unique combination of folder/filename which creates an ambiguous mismatch, but it's extremely rare.

Andre

[Rob DeMillo]

That's great - it makes scripting of bringing the playlists over from Plex a lot easier whenever I make a change on the Plex side.

[andrewilley]

If you do find an ambiguous match by the way (and they are very rare) try renaming one of the clashing filenames or containing folder names - and obviously change the corresponding entry within the M3U playlist file to match.

Andre

[İbrahim Yiğit]

Sorry for very late answer. I had some examinations. Fortunately I passes all my exams :). Anyway my music folders are like that: 

"Artist's name"/ "song's name"

"Artist's name"/"CD1 Track2"

"Artist's name"/"Song's name-artist's name"

"Artist's name"/"Song's name(320)" 

...

So my song's file names and song's titles doesn't match lots of time. Lots of time they aren't same. So I think there isn't anything to do unless I change every song's name by one by. Am I true? I think I have to match every song's title and file name. Is that true?

[andrewilley]

@İbrahim Yiğit Exactly correct.

As far as Poweramp is concerned, a Playlist is nothing more than a line-by-line list of audio filenames - each of which must exist on your device's local storage. The filename must be exactly the same as the text quoted in the playlist file, and the folder that contains it must also be an exact match for the first level of folder shown in the playlist. If those two conditions are met, the song will be visible and playable from that Playlist in Poweramp. Otherwise, you will see a placeholder showing the complete filename that it was looking for.

See my post above which discusses the information that Spotify (for example) exports, versus the required layout of a Playlist file. 

So while some automation of the process could be attempted, there will need to be a lot of manual tweaking to fit in with your folder structure. Perhaps making your folder structure more consistent might make that task easier too?

Oh, and congratulations on passing all your exams! 

Andre

[İbrahim Yiğit]

Ok, I found Name Mangler app to change all the music files with only 2 or 3 touches. 

You can set all the music file's name like "title" or "artist" - "title" ... but this time I have another problem. PA can't import non-English character include songs. My song's name are in Turkish and we have some characters like "ü,ğ,ç,ö,ş,ı,İ...". PA didin't take them to playlist. Also some of the songs have two artists. PA didin't take them also. But this topic got me  bored. Also it comes me long job. So I quit.  :d Thank you guys for your helps. 

[andrewilley]

Yes, it would probably be a long job so might not be worth your time.

However PA does handle international characters in filenames - but you need to remember than Android's underlying filesystem (which was based on Linux) uses the international 'UTF-8' Unicode encoding standard.  This may not always match with a Windows-sourced text file that may be using the decades-old extended ASCII (8-bit, Latin-1) standard. That opens a whole new can of worms, but basically if you save your playlist file using the extender .M3U8 and create the content in a text editor that uses Unicode, you will find most filenames should match fine. Latin files may or may not work, depending on the character mapping.

Andre

[İbrahim Yiğit]

Thank you very much Andre for your helps and time.

[jongler]

Hey there, fellow music lovers! I'm new to this forum and just stumbled upon this thread about importing Spotify playlists into PA.

[andrewilley]

@jongler Of course the first thing you need to do is to download all the actual song files onto your local device, and then ensure that the Spotify playlist is using the exact same filenames. Might be a long job...

Andre