Importing playlists¶
In Settings → Import playlists (in the classic app: the settings menu → Import playlists):
- Choose a file. Nothing is saved yet: the app shows each playlist in it, how many of its songs were found in your libraries, and, opened, what each song matched.
- Pick and name them. Untick any you don't want, and rename any whose name is taken (the app flags those). Each can come in as a playlist or into Liked Songs (a file's "Liked Songs" starts that way).
- Import. The playlists are created. Songs you don't have are kept, dimmed, as missing entries; when a scan adds them, they link up and play. Songs going into Liked Songs are liked in the file's order, its first the newest; only ones in your library can be.
| File | Where from | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
Extended M3U (.m3u, .m3u8, starting #EXTM3U): preferred |
Music players and servers: foobar2000, VLC, MusicBee, Winamp, Navidrome, Jellyfin, Plex… | One playlist: each song's file path, length, artist and title; often its name (#PLAYLIST) |
Plain M3U (.m3u, .m3u8) |
The same, when they don't write the extended kind | One playlist: just the file paths (artist, album and title are guessed from the folders) |
| Spotify (CSV or JSON) | scripts/export_spotify_library.py (its header says how to set it up) |
Liked Songs and any of your playlists, in one file |
| CSV | Exportify, TuneMyMusic, Soundiiz and similar (for Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Tidal, Deezer and more) | One or more playlists |
How songs are matched, best first; anything else is left unmatched rather than guessed:
| Match | When |
|---|---|
| path | M3U only: a library file whose path ends the same way (artist folder / album folder / file name). The start doesn't matter, so a playlist made on another computer, or with the music under another folder (D:\Music\…, ../../Libraries/…), still matches. |
| album | Same title, artist and album |
| close | Same title and artist, lengths within 5 seconds |
| only | Same title and artist, and the library has just one such song |
Titles, artists and albums are compared without case, accents or punctuation (& is "and"), and
without what services add to the same recording ("- Remastered 2011", "(feat. X)", "(Deluxe
Edition)"). Live, acoustic and remixed versions stay different songs.
Good to know:
- M3U: export the extended kind when the player offers a choice (most write it by default):
its artist, title and length are the fallback when a path doesn't match. Paths may be absolute,
relative, Windows-style or
file://. Internet radio streams in a playlist are left out. - Text encodings: UTF-8 (
.m3u8, CSV) and Windows-1252 (older players'.m3u) both read right. - Size: up to 10 MB a file; a whole Spotify library export is a few MB.