This tiny project allows you to download in a more reliable way your YouTube Music library. I tried many times to export all my uploads using Google Takeout but songs were missing and the export is unbelieviably messy.
With the help of yt-dlp, I put together several scripts that will semi-automate the export process.
- Parse and format your library's song list metadata
- Download all songs (embeds song title, artist, album, and thumbnail)
- Resume-able download script
- Songs pre-clustering (by album)
Tested on macOS/PHP 8.1.
Clone this repository anywhere:
cd ~/Music
git clone [email protected]:eexit/youtube-music-library-exporter.git
cd youtube-music-library-exporter
Install dependencies (assuming you have homebrew installed):
brew install yt-dlp/taps/yt-dlp ffmpeg php composer
composer install
The metadata file is a JSON file containing all your uploaded songs basic information.
Sample:
[
{
"id": "iS2LWA7-hkM",
"album": "Emotional Technology",
"artist": "BT",
"duration": "7:48",
"href": "https:\/\/music.youtube.com\/watch?v=iS2LWA7-hkM",
"is_liked": null,
"title": "Paris"
},
{
"id": "UiEfsYkr4gY",
"album": null,
"artist": "The Chainsmokers",
"duration": "3:52",
"href": "https:\/\/music.youtube.com\/watch?v=UiEfsYkr4gY",
"is_liked": true,
"title": "Paris (BKAYE Remix)"
}
]
To generate it, follow these steps:
- Open https://music.youtube.com/library/uploaded_songs
- Scroll all the way to the bottom of your list (this may take a while if you have thousands of songs)
- Save the page (
CTRL
/CMD
+S
) as HTML-only into this project's clone directory - Run the
metadata-extractor
script:
❯ ./metadata-extractor
YouTube Music Upload Metadata Extractor
=======================================
Will extract ./metadata.json from ./YouTube Music.html:
7369/7369 [============================] 100% 7 secs
[OK] done
You have now a metadata.json
file containing all the songs info of your entire library. This file is the source of truth for the next scripts. You may add manually missing data if needed.
See the script's help: ./metadata-extractor --help
.
Before you start, you need to grab your YouTube Music's session cookies dumped by the "Get cookies.txt" extension. Save the file into this project's clone directory.
Use the downloader
script to download all the songs listed in the metadata.json
file:
❯ ./downloader
YouTube Music Upload Downloader
===============================
Will now download 7368 songs:
3697/7368 [==============>-------------] 50% 10 hrs
You can watch for the logs:
❯ tail -f downloader.log
[2022-03-14T11:34:22.799174+00:00] downloader.INFO: success {"id":"NZjN83C1K9M","song_path":"./downloads/NZjN83C1K9M.m4a"} []
[2022-03-14T11:34:30.753464+00:00] downloader.INFO: success {"id":"xIU9tu9l_co","song_path":"./downloads/xIU9tu9l_co.m4a"} []
[2022-03-14T11:34:37.341654+00:00] downloader.INFO: success {"id":"ca3w36Ua_aM","song_path":"./downloads/ca3w36Ua_aM.m4a"} []
By default, the script downloads all into the ./downloads
directory and flattens all songs named by their ID. Each song has its metadata/thumbnail embedded.
See the script's help: ./downloader --help
.
Use the clusterer
script to cluster your songs. It will use the metadata.json
file and songs downloaded into the ./downloads
directory.
By default, the script clusters all into the ./clusters
directory and creates one sub-directory per album and leaves the songs without album in the first level:
clusters
├── Guiding Light - Gettin' Rolled Out
│ ├── Gettin' Rolled Out.m4a
│ └── Guiding Light (feat. Ali).m4a
├── Guru Josh Project - Infinity 2008 (Klaas Remix).m4a
├── Guys My Age (Prince Fox Remix)
│ └── Guys My Age (Prince Fox Remix).m4a
├── Ham Demo and Justin Time - Here I Am (Ham 2005 Remix).m4a
├── Happy morning
│ ├── Get Down On It.m4a
│ ├── High Energy.m4a
│ ├── I got you (I feel good).m4a
│ ├── Ring My Bell.m4a
│ └── We are family (live).m4a
├── Hardcore 2004 - You Ready?
│ ├── Hardcore 2004.m4a
│ └── You Ready?.m4a
├── Hardcore Classics Disc 3
│ └── Be Happy.m4a
├── Harlea - Miss Me.m4a
├── Haze and Weaver vs. Shox - Get up 2004.m4a
├── Heartburn
│ └── Heartburn.m4a
See the script's help: ./clusterer --help
.
For playlists, it's basically the same process as the metadata extractor: save the playlist HTML page locally, then run the script playlist-extrator
. It will create a basic text file of this format:
[title] by [artist]
[title] by [artist]
...
See the script's help: ./playlist-extractor --help
.
Adapt the format to your needs.
If you like your library to be clean and accurate, you can leverage MusicBrainz Picard's Scan feature to fix and rename your songs.
Once again, this is a long and manual process but hopefully, you do only have to do it once.
- Song order is not restored and metadata information is at its most basic. This is still way better than the regular Takeout export. The most automated way to restore the song order would be to crawl each album/playlist page and parse it using the metadata extractor script, then update the clusterer script logic to handle order file naming.
- Some steps are still manual and tedious and could/should be automated. I believe the songs page HTML source fetching could be done using Taiko.
- Song downloading process is rather slow (~10s per song) BUT it could be faster if you decide to skip the song's metadata and/or thumbnail. I was able to download all my 7k+ songs library in a couple of hours vs a day when embedding all these info.